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W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones: Self-Consuming Images of Identity

  • Chris MorashEmail author
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Abstract

Images of identity are often grounded in particular places; however, place is not purely a spatial concept. If place is produced through memories, associations and residues of past events, it is equally a temporal concept. This chapter looks at a play by W. B. Yeats—The Dreaming of the Bones—written in response to one of the key events in modern Irish history, the 1916 Rising, in which questions of identity were contested in a military uprising whose meaning continues to be disputed. Combining a genetic approach to literature with historicist reading, framed in the context of Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the dual nature of the image, this chapter explores the spatial and temporal axes of the production of identity in Yeats’s work for the theatre.

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© The Author(s) 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Trinity College DublinDublinIreland

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