ISBN
Language
- English
THEMA
- DSBH
- DSC
- DSR
- KNTP1
- GBCR
- 1DDR
BISAC
- LIT004120
- LIT014000
- LIT024050
- LAN027000
- REF004000
Keywords
- W. B. Yeats
- book history
- publishing history
- textual scholarship
- bibliography
- Irish literary modernism
Yeats’s Permanent Self
W. B. Yeats, His Books, and Publishers, 1886–1916
- Warwick Gould (author)
- John Harwood (editor)
This volume offers a richly documented account of how W. B. Yeats shaped, revised and republished his work from the beginnings of his literary career, through his often fraught negotiations with rival publishers until 1916, when he committed himself to Macmillan for the eventual publication of his Collected Works. Drawing on extensive archival and bibliographical research, Warwick Gould follows the intertwined histories of Yeats’s individual books—their conception, material forms, publication, reception and continual transformation—to show how the “lives” of books can illuminate the life of a writer.
At the heart of the study is Yeats’s pursuit of what he called his 'permanent self': the desire to fashion an enduring image of himself through his collected works, even as his relentless habit ofrevision continually destabilised that ideal. Examining publishers, editions, bindings, markets, audiences and authorial intentions, Gould reveals the complex material circumstances through which Yeats’s canon emerged. The result is both an absorbing study of one of modern literature’s most self-conscious authors and a distinctive 'biblio-biography' demonstrating how publishing history can transform our understanding of literary identity and textual creation.
Contributors
Warwick Gould
(author)Warwick Gould, FRSL, FSA, FRSA, (1947-1925) was internationally renowned for his scholarship on English and Irish Literature, the history of the book, and, most notably, W.B. Yeats and his circle. He took his first degree in English Literature and Language at the University of Queensland, and did his postgraduate research at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He was appointed Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway in 1973, and, in 1994, Professor of English Literature, at the University of London, where he played a major role in the formation of the Institute of English Studies. He helped found the MA in the History of the Book the following year – the first such programme in the English-speaking world – and was founding Director of the Institute of English Studies from 1999 until his retirement in 2013. He remained a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute until his death. His many distinguished publications include (with Marjorie Reeves) Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel (1988, re. 2001); co-editor (with Philip L Marcus and Michael J Sidnell) of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition (1981, rev. 1992), co-editor (with Deirdre Toomey and John Kelly) of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900 (1997), and (with Deirdre Toomey) of Mythologies (2005). Together with Deirdre Toomey, his constant companion in research as in life, he edited Yeats Annual for nearly forty years: they died within three weeks of one another in December 2025.
John Harwood
(editor)John Harwood was born in Hobart and educated at the University of Tasmania and Cambridge University. In 1973, he was appointed Lecturer in English at the Flinders University of South Australia, where he later became Reader In English, and then Head of the School of English and Drama, before leaving in 1997 to write fiction full time. His academic publications include Olivia Shakespear and W.B. Yeats (1989) and Eliot To Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation (1995). He worked with Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey on various Yeats-related projects over many years, and contributed regularly to Yeats Annual, of which he remains a member of the Editorial Board. His novels The Ghost Writer (2004), The Séance (2008) and The Asylum (2012) have been translated into several languages.