Religion and Aesthetic Experience in Joyce and Yeats [Hardcover]

This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art can be seen as a form of religious experience.Acknowledgements Introduction: Argument and Contexts PART I: THE CREATIVE PROCESS AND SOCIAL ACTION 1. Yeats and Art as a Form of Religious Experience 2. Joyce and Art as a Form of Religious Experience 3. Sorel's Social Myth and Art as a Form of Religious Experience PART II: READER RESPONSE AND SOCIAL ACTION 4. Aesthetic Experience, Religion, and Economic Materialism in Yeats 5. Aesthetic Experience, Religion, and Economic Materialism in Joyce 6. Sorel's Social Myth, Aesthetico-Religious Experience, and Economic Materialism Conclusion: Art and Life Rhythms Notes Bibliography

Tudor Balinisteanu obtained his PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK, and is currently a Senior Research Fellow in English Literature at University of Suceava, Romania. He is the author of Violence, Narrative and Myth in Joyce and Yeats: Subjective Identity and Anarcho-Syndicalist Traditions (Palgrave, 2013), and Narrative, Social Myth, and Reality in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Women's Writing: Kennedy, Lochhead, Bourke, N? Dhuibhne, and Carr (2009). He has also published in a number of UK, Irish, Canadian, and US journals.