By Dr Oliver Tearle Analysing James Joyce is rarely easy. The Irish modernist writer loved ambiguity, the essential mystery and unknowability of everyday life, and the slipperiness of language, and his novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake certainly attest to the last of these. But before these novels, Joyce wrote a […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ stands, in many ways, as W. B. Yeats’s swansong. It was the final major poem published in his last volume of poems, which appeared the year before he died in 1939. But what is ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ about? The poem doesn’t […]
James Joyce’s collection Dubliners (1914) was not an initial commercial success. It sold just 379 copies in its first year of publication, and 120 of those were bought by Joyce himself. Yet Dubliners redefined the short story and is now viewed as a classic work of modernist fiction, with each […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote ‘Easter 1916’ in the summer of 1916, shortly after the Easter Rising in Dublin and when the events were still fresh in the memory. Yeats had conflicted feelings towards the rising – more details about which can be read here – […]
An analysis of a short Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Death’ is not perhaps numbered among the most famous poems by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), but it is probably the shortest of all his finest poems. In just a dozen lines, Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them […]