Re-imaging Yeats: Contestations and Negotiations - (Abstracts deadline 30.09.2015 & Full Paper due on 31.10.2015)

full name / name of organization: 
DR SUDIPTA CHAKRABORTY, S.B. COLLEGE, BURDWAN UNIVERSITY & SUKHENDU DAS, BANKURA UNIVERSITY, WEST BENGAL, INDIA
contact email: 

Call for Papers
Re-imaging Yeats: Contestations and Negotiations
(Essays in Commemoration of the 150th Birth Anniversary of William Butler Yeats)

An Edited volume of Scholarly Articles to be published by a reputed publisher with ISBN
(tentatively by the end of 2015)

Editors:
Dr Sudipta Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of English, Sreegopal Banerjee College (Govt. Sponsored), Hooghly, West Bengal
Sukhendu Das, Assistant Professor of English, Bankura University, Bankura, West Bengal

This year we are celebrating the 150th birth anniversary of W.B. Yeats. In recent times Yeats scholarship is completely on a different trajectory. Central to his prolific literary output is the question of his polysemic configurations of Irish nationality and Irish identity. His imagined conceptions of Irishness, as Marjorie Howes observes, are largely shaped by the various concomitant issues of gender, sexuality and class. Yeats's reactionary nationalism in the revolutionary Ireland and his life-long adherence to the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency culture and value system have been the subject of much debate. Seamus Deane and Richard Kearney are radical in advocating that Yeats, by embracing fascism and violence, espoused a damaging kind of nationalism. As a Free State Senator and as a Protestant intellectual in a predominantly Catholic country, Yeats had a troubled relationship with the Irish national politics in a period of rapid historical change. A sizable number of critics labelled Yeats's political opinions as 'elitist and authoritarian'. Another group projects him as a 'liberal humanist and individualist'. All these discursive problems associated with Yeats's "Irishness" open up the great possibility of re-situating and reconfiguring Yeats in a critical interdisciplinary framework that contests modular forms of interpretation and encourages exploration of multiple cultural formations and polyvalent subjectivity in his life and works.

With this whole set of refreshing outlooks this commemorative volume invites original research articles from college and university teachers and research scholars towards problematizing and diversifying the scope and scales of Yeats studies so that we may widen the discursive horizon beyond the sacred position Yeats occupies in the canon and culture of British modernism. Hence the exigency for theorizing Yeats from the critical standpoints of comparative literature, cultural studies, gender and postcolonial studies as well as from those of other emerging areas like space and cultural geography studies, whiteness studies, social gerontology etc. In view of the vast corpus of Yeats's work as poet, dramatist, autobiographer, essayist and metaphysical thinker the proposed volume will be double focused – it proposes to engage with Yeats as an international literary figure featuring at the crossroads of European and global modernisms, and simultaneously as a nationalist intellectual born of and responding to the Irish culture and politics of his times.

Clearly our project takes interest in the sociological analysis of Yeats' literary modernism, politics and "Irishness". At the same time, keeping in view Yeats' Indian links and his enthusiasm for Indian philosophy, esoteric traditions and Hinduism, it is imperative that we should now try to question his representation of the subcontinent and the underlying assumptions. Relations with women, particularly Maud Gonne in early life and Olivia Shakespeare in the last years, remain central to Yeats' writings; he saw them largely as muse-figures. Yeats' reflections on the role of women are often coloured by his desire for a masculine national culture for his country, yet he wishes them to recognize the value of spiritual autonomy and independence. Again, his flirting with eugenics and his fascination for the Fascist 'Blueshirts' organization in his later years are also deeply controversial issues. Reasonably enough, Yeats' postcolonial and feminist critics have found Yeats' intense but troubled relationship with Irish nationalism and his imaginative recuperation of a magical-occultist-heroic Ireland as constitutive of rich ambivalence in his oeuvre and profoundly shot with the contingencies of race, gender, class and history. In fact a number of recent feminist critics, notably Elizabeth Cullingford and Marjorie Howes among them, have noticed a fair degree of sexual politics in Yeats' cultural proclamations. And nearly all the major postcolonial critics of Yeats in recent past, including Seamus Deane, David Lloyd, Edward Said and Jahan Ramazani notably among others, have chosen to work in close reference to the shared experience of politics, aesthetics and geography in Yeats' writings. At the heart of their varied engagement with Yeats lies the common recognition that Ireland and Irish nationalism in Yeats' writings delineate a deeply conflict-ridden cultural geography of identity and erasure.

Style, personality – deliberately adopted and therefore a mask, says Yeats in Autobiographies, is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and the money-changers. But here our objective, as the title of the proposed volume suggests, is to re-present new images of Yeats by confronting and negotiating his thoughts and beliefs at their very worldly, material sites of production and mediation in his life and times. We are therefore hopeful that our contributors will respond to the new trends in Yeats studies in recent years and raise new questions about the representations of nation, nationalism, race, gender and history in Yeats' writings along with Yeats' politics and cultural identity in the hermeneutic sphere of Irish colonial experience vis-à-vis the shifting fashions of Irish and European literary culture in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Possible topics may include but are not necessarily restricted to the following:
• Yeats and Modernisms – European and Global
• Yeats and Irish Literary Culture
• Yeats: Aesthetics and Philosophy
• In Search of a National Theatre – Yeats and Drama
• Yeats: Concepts of Time and History
• Yeats: Race, Class and Nationality
• Engendering Yeats – Yeats' Women
• Yeats and Myth Studies
• Poetics and Politics of 'Lust and Rage' – Last Poems
• Yeats: Fascism and Eugenics
• Yeats and Empire
• Yeats and Gerontology
• Yeats' Afterlives

Guidelines:
• Manuscripts must contain original and hitherto
unpublished research articles by the contributors
• Manuscripts must be within 3000 and 5000 words
including the main body of the text, Endnotes and list
of Works Cited)
• For the purpose of blind peer review manuscripts must
not contain any reference to the author detail
• Manuscripts must be submitted in MS-Word (doc./docx)
format
• In-text citations and documentation must strictly adhere
to the latest edition of MLA Handbook.
• Endnotes must be used instead of Footnotes.
• Font: Times New Roman
• Title: 14 pt. bold
• Text: 12 pt. double spaced

Manuscripts must be accompanied with the following items:
• Cover page with Abstract within 150 words and short
Author-bio in 50 words in third person
• A duly signed Declaration of Originality attached
herewith (mentioning that the authors will be solely
responsible for any act of plagiarism and the legal
obligations thereof)
• A scanned copy of signed author permission for
publishing the article in the volume

Deadline of submitting the Abstract and Author-bio: 30th September, 2015
Deadline of submitting the full paper: 31st October, 2015
(*publication status will be communicated to the contributors from time to time before publishing the volume)

Manuscripts must be communicated via e-mail attachment to both the editors with the subject line "Re-imaging Yeats – submission"
Dr Sudipta Chakraborty: schakra2006@gmail.com
Sukhendu Das: sukhendujimmy@gmail.com
(*authors may be required to communicate hard copies of the manuscripts, if necessary)