The Countess Cathleen

The Countess Cathleen Synopsis

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:

"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."-Irish Literary Supplement

"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."-A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound

"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally.... The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press.... The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet.... Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."-Yeats Annual (1983)

Originally published in 1892, The Countess Cathleen aroused fierce controversy when it was first performed in 1899. The play was frequently revived and almost as often revised, becoming at various points in Yeats's career a decisive indicator of his relations with his literary and theatrical public, of his changing conception of dramatic form, and of the status of his pursuit of Maud Gonne, for whom the play was written. This volume in the Cornell Yeats reproduces the complete set of extant manuscripts preceding the play's first publication and reassembles the extensive manuscript, proof, and authorial copy to present a crucial body of evidence of Yeats's work and thought in drama and theater over the course of three decades.

The volume gives literatim transcriptions and photographic reproductions of all the holographic materials pertaining to the writing, revising, and rewriting of The Countess Cathleen from 1889 to 1934. It includes all textual variants from other sources such as typescript, corrected proofs, and prompt copies.

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