Yeats, William Butler

New York. 1989. Macmillan. 1st of This Particular Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0026327015. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. 105 pages. hardcover. Front jacket art by Oskar Kokoschka #48. from National Museum Wales. Front jacket design by Marek Antoniak. keywords: Poetry Ireland Literature. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XII: John Sherman and Dhoya is part of a fourteen-volume series overseen by eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. The series includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, with authoritative and explanatory textual notes. First published in 1891, John Sherman and Dhoya was Yeats's third separate publication. The stories were revised and reprinted in the 1908 Collected Works in Verse and Prose but not published again in Yeats's lifetime. John Sherman, Yeats's only completed attempt at realistic fiction, details the title character's dilemma: He must choose between life in London and marriage to Margaret Leland, an English girl, and life in Ireland and marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Mary Carton. In addition to containing numerous autobiographical elements (for instance, the town of Ballah is modeled on Yeats's Sligo), the novelette treats many of Yeats's persistent themes, such as the debate between nationality and cosmopolitanism and the conflict between what he would later call the Self and the Anti-self. In the end, Sherman reaffirms his Irish roots, and Margaret Leland's affections are transferred to Sherman's friend, the Reverend William Howard. Dhoya, a mythological tale set in the remote past, depicts a liaison between a mortal and a fairy, a motif that Yeats used in many other works. Describing the inevitable conflict between a world of perfection and the mortal world, the short story suggests that ‘only the changing, and moody, and angry, and weary can love.' Well received by most contemporary reviewers, John Sherman and Dhoya are important both as works of fiction and as indications of the fundamental continuity of subject and theme in Yeats's career. This edition offers an accurate text, an introduction, and explanatory notes. inventory #25654 ISBN: 0026327015.