W. B. Yeats's "The Winding Stair and Other Poems "was published in 1933 when Yeats was sixty-eight, ten years after he won the Nobel Prize and six years before his death in 1939. Yeats famously invoked in "Adam's Curse" the time he spent "stitching and unstitching" the lines of his work, but he also spent considerable time stitching and unstitching his poems to each other. "The Winding Stair "demonstrates that care, combining and reordering the poems of two earlier publications in an edition intended as the companion volume to "The Tower," published in 1928.
This Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly the pages of the elegantly planned and designed first edition of "The Winding Stair and Other Poems "as it first appeared, including a photo of the cover design on which Yeats collaborated. It adds an introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein.
Yeats's longest separate volume of verse, it features sixty-four poems written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among them are such masterpieces as "Blood and the Moon," "Byzantium," the Coole Park poems, "Vacillation," and two separately titled long sequences ending with the exquisite lyric "From the 'Antigone.'" These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot's contention that Yeats was one of the few poets "whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."

Material Modernism draws on editorial theory, cultural studies and the history of the book to argue for a freshly historicized reading of modernism. Instead of taking texts as consisting of disembodied words, Bornstein considers their physical bodies as themselves semantically important. He argues that current constructions of literary modernism - like those that regard its achievements and attitudes as favoring the anti-historical over the historical, or product over process - are derived from the fixed, current, material forms of its texts. By studying modernism in its original sites of production and in the continually shifting physicality of its transmissions, an alternative construction emerges that emphasizes historical contingency, multiple versions, and the material features of the text itself. Bornstein recontextualizes works by a range of British, Irish, and American authors, including W. B. Yeats, Emma Lazarus, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, among others.

From 1888 to 1892 W.B.Yeats contributed a series of essays on literature and Irish folklore to two American newspapers, the Boston Pilot and Providence Sunday Journal. These important but little-known pieces show his intense engagement with current books, plays, personalities and controversies. They also make major statements about the issues of cultural nationalism and theatrical reform that preoccupied the poet. Newly edited, annotated, and introduced by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, Letters to the New Island offers a fresh glimpse of Yeats as an active polemicist, critic and all-round man of letters.

Drawing fascinating comparisons between two literary movements for social justice, Tracy Mishkin explores the link between the Irish Renaissance that began in the 1880s and the African-American movement of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Starting with evidence that Ireland's Abbey Theatre tours of the United States before World War I influenced such African-Americans as Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson, Mishkin offers the first full-scale discussion of the historical similarities and differences of the two movements. Both rose from the ashes of history -- from people suffering years of oppression during which their native languages were lost or stolen -- to confront issues of language and identity; and both had to combat negative mainstream representation of their people, all the while debating how to create their own literature. Included throughout is the work of women who participated in both movements but who often have been marginalized in their histories.

Going beyond national boundaries, Mishkin takes the study of interracial literary influence across the Atlantic and establishes important parallels between the Harlem and Irish Renaisances.

A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses "to let the principals speak for themselves." While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the "lost connections" through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie's Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.

"Early Essays," edited by the internationally esteemed Yeats scholars George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran, includes the contents of the two most important collections of Yeats's critical prose, "Ideas of Good and Evil" (1903) and "The Cutting of an Agate" (1912, 1919). Among the seminal essays are considerations of Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, and Synge, as well as an extended discussion of the Japanese Noh theatre. The first scholarly edition of these materials, "Early Essays" offers a corrected text and detailed annotation of all allusions. Several appendices include materials from early printings which were later excluded, as well as black and white illustrations. "Early Essays" is essential reading for understanding Yeats's career and the development of modern poetry and criticism