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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
W. B. Yeats's "John Sherman; and, Dhoya" is a fascinating exploration of the complex interplay between identity, social dynamics, and the mystical elements of Irish folklore. This collection, comprising two distinct narratives, showcases Yeats's deft mastery of language and his early experimentation with symbolism and lyrical prose. The stories reflect Yeats's engagement with the cultural and spiritual themes that would dominate his later works, as they weave personal introspection with mythic traditions, juxtaposing the modern self against the backdrop of the Irish landscape and its rich heritage. This work not only reveals his burgeoning philosophical interests but also places him within the literary context of the Irish Literary Revival, where folklore and individual spirituality begin to merge. W. B. Yeats, one of Ireland's most celebrated poets, was deeply influenced by the cultural upheaval of his time, including nationalist movements and a burgeoning interest in the mystical. His early forays into prose, as seen in "John Sherman; and, Dhoya," illustrate his quest to understand the human condition through both personal and collective lenses. Yeats's close relationships with influential figures in the Irish revivalist movement informed his appreciation for folklore and tradition, which he seeks to reclaim in these stories. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in the origins of modern Irish literature and the intricate relationship between myth and self-discovery. "John Sherman; and, Dhoya" offers a rich tapestry of themes that resonate with contemporary explorations of identity and belonging, making it a compelling read for both Yeats enthusiasts and new audiences alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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John Sherman; and, Dhoya
Table of Contents
Introduction
A single life stands at the crossing of modern ambition and ancestral enchantment. In W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman; and, Dhoya, the reader encounters two complementary modes of storytelling—one grounded in social realism, the other steeped in mythic atmosphere—through which Yeats tests how identity is shaped by place, choice, and memory. Together they stage a quiet drama of belonging and a luminous fable of the uncanny, asking what must be surrendered and what can be kept when the self moves between city streets and wind-swept coasts. The result is an early, revealing portrait of the writer who would later redefine Irish literature.
This volume brings together a short novel, John Sherman, and a tale, Dhoya, written during Yeats’s formative years in the late nineteenth century. It presents a rare view of the poet as a young prose stylist, attentive to the cadence of speech and the suggestive power of image. Rather than ornate displays, the pieces offer clarity and restraint, allowing character, mood, and setting to carry meaning. The contrast between them—one intimate and domestic, the other visionary and folkloric—anticipates the dual energies that would animate Yeats’s career: a disciplined modern sensibility in dialogue with the deep currents of myth.
The book is considered a classic not for celebrity alone but for its position at a crucial hinge in literary history. It helps mark the transition from Victorian narrative decorum to the symbolist and revivalist experiments that shaped modern Irish letters. By fusing the everyday with the otherworldly, Yeats laid groundwork for a national literature that could speak both to ordinary experience and to ancestral memory. Later writers found in this method a durable model for blending local texture with archetypal resonance, and readers continue to prize the volume for its quiet audacity and its lucid, musical prose.
Authored by W. B. Yeats—who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923—John Sherman; and, Dhoya was first published in 1891, early in his career. Composed during the emergence of the Irish Literary Revival, the book reflects Yeats’s growing commitment to treating Irish life and legend with artistic seriousness. While primarily known as a poet, he here demonstrates how narrative can sharpen questions that lyric utterance sometimes only suggests. The prose is economical, attentive to rhythm and symbol, and oriented toward the moral pressures of choice, exile, and return, concerns that recur throughout his subsequent poetry and drama.
John Sherman offers a portrait of a young man negotiating the pull of the west of Ireland against the claims of urban life. The narrative remains intimate, attentive to modest gestures and domestic spaces, and it locates drama in competing loyalties rather than in sensational events. Without revealing its turns, one can say that the work studies how a person weighs the call of home, habit, and affection against opportunity, reputation, and change. It does so with a quiet humor and a tenderness for human limitation, inviting readers to consider how place molds character and how expectation shapes desire.
Dhoya moves into the visionary register that Yeats would later refine, telling a tale suffused with the atmosphere of folklore and the uncanny. The prose attends closely to landscape, weather, and silence, letting the world itself carry a sense of fate. Rather than offering elaborate mythology, it uses suggestive detail to evoke memory’s hauntings and the perilous beauty of longing. The story traces a pattern of pursuit and remembrance whose outcome depends less on plot mechanics than on mood and symbol. In this way, it provides an early compass for Yeats’s later explorations of the otherworld.
These works reveal an artist exploring how prose might serve ends different from the lyric: patient observation, social nuance, and narrative suspense on the one hand, and concentrated mythic resonance on the other. Yeats experiments with perspective and pacing, allowing silence and implication to do much of the work. He returns to concerns that define his career—self-fashioning, the claims of community, and the tension between modern life and inherited forms—while resisting didactic answers. The result is an art of measured suggestion, where images recur with quiet insistence and where the reader completes meaning by sensing the pressure of unspoken histories.
As an early achievement, the book’s influence lies in its method rather than in a single famous scene. It demonstrates how Irish settings could be rendered with fidelity without surrendering to local color, and how myth could be handled with restraint rather than ornament. This approach helped legitimize a mode of writing that would inform the Irish Literary Revival’s broader aims: to root modern art in national materials without reducing them to nostalgia. Scholars have long noted how these prose experiments anticipate Yeats’s dramatic innovations and his carefully patterned later lyrics, where symbol, rhythm, and fable interlock.
Key facts underscore the book’s importance. Written by Yeats and published in 1891, it pairs a realistic short novel with a myth-inflected tale, bridging manners and myth. It belongs to a period when Yeats was shaping a public voice for Irish artistic self-definition, in dialogue with contemporaries similarly turning to folklore and local speech. The volume’s compact scale belies its ambition: to test whether prose can shelter both the intimate pressures of choice and the shimmering weight of legend. It stands, therefore, as a touchstone for understanding the origins of Yeats’s mature artistic program.
Readers coming to the book today often discover a refreshing clarity unencumbered by later theoretical apparatus. The sentences move with a subtle music, the descriptions are economical, and the characters are drawn with sympathy but without sentimentality. The mythic tale refuses easy allegory, and the realistic novel abjures melodrama, trusting instead in moral texture and atmosphere. This balance explains the work’s endurance: it invites multiple readings without requiring specialized knowledge. As Yeats’s standing grew, the volume became a key early chapter in the story of how he learned to make the national intimate and the intimate archetypal.
The themes are enduring: the search for a home that can contain one’s divided wishes; the allure and danger of memory; the dialogue between rational prospects and irrational longings. Yeats treats landscape not as background but as a shaping force, and he treats custom not as nostalgia but as a living pressure on choice. The juxtaposition of the two pieces allows readers to feel how the same questions resonate differently across modes. In one, the social world presses inward; in the other, the invisible presses outward. Together they show how fiction can stage competing truths without flattening them.
For contemporary audiences, the book remains urgent because its conflicts persist: mobility versus rootedness, career versus kinship, disenchantment versus wonder. In an age of rapid movement and fractured attention, its patient rhythms counsel attentiveness, and its restrained symbolism models how art can honor mystery without obscurity. John Sherman; and, Dhoya offers a concise, luminous entry into Yeats’s lifelong project of reconciling modern life with old inheritances. It reminds readers that literature can be both hospitable and profound, grounded and visionary, and it endures as a classic by revealing how the smallest choices can echo across worlds.
Synopsis (Selection)
The volume opens in a small town on Ireland's western coast, where John Sherman, a modest and introspective young clerk, moves through habitual days among shopfronts, quays, and hills. His routine is orderly: a desk in a quiet office, evening walks, polite visits, and the steady watchfulness of neighbors who expect him to marry and prosper locally. He is respectful of these expectations yet curious about the larger world beyond the harbor. Talk of a position in a distant commercial house awakens that curiosity. Letters, friendly counsel, and a tentative understanding with a local young woman frame his hesitation as he weighs departure.
John accepts the chance and travels to a great city, trading the measured pace of the provinces for crowded streets, fog, and offices where he is one clerk among many. The anonymity is bracing and bewildering. He learns the new routine, writes dutiful letters home, and observes the confident manners of colleagues and clients. Introduced to a circle of refined acquaintances, he is drawn to a worldly young woman whose conversation and ease seem to embody possibility. Her rooms and parties contrast with his boardinghouse economy. Flattered yet unsure, he balances work, invitations, and a conscience that remembers promises made before leaving.
As weeks turn to months, impressions harden into choices. Small misread signals in salons and offices unsettle him, while the letters from home arrive with steady affection and unspoken concern. He recognizes the costs of living beyond his means and the subtle performances expected in fashionable rooms. A public outing and a private conversation test his sense of himself, asking whether he will pursue ambition, romance, or the quieter obligations that have shaped him since youth. The contrast between metropolitan charm and provincial plainness sharpens, and with it the pressure to declare intentions that will bind not only his own future.
Circumstances draw John back to the west, where familiar roads and faces greet him with warmth and candid curiosity. The landscape he once took for granted appears newly vivid: rain-bright fields, the shore, the voices of traders and fishermen. In this setting he meets again the young woman whose steadiness shaped his last months at home. Their conversations are frank but tactful, circling hopes and practical concerns. Town gossip revives, and well-meaning elders arrange encounters meant to hasten decisions. He feels both anchored and confined, sensing that his experience elsewhere has changed how he hears praise, counsel, and the silence between words.
A summer gathering brings matters to a head: music, neighbors, and the small rituals that mark belonging. John is attentive to courtesy and feeling, yet the memory of metropolitan rooms still hovers, with their promise of polish and novelty. An awaited letter arrives, and with it an invitation that cannot be ignored. Friends press gently for clarity, and those who care for him leave space for his conscience. The choice before him no longer appears as pride against humility but as a question of fit and truth. His answer will shape households and reputations, yet it must be given without spectacle.
The story resolves without melodrama, favoring steady feeling over sudden gesture. John weighs affection, responsibility, and the life he can sustain, then answers with quiet firmness. The resolution turns on ordinary kindness and the recognition of what suits his nature, rather than on triumph or defeat. The city interlude remains important as measure and mirror, but the lasting value is found in honest speech and work that does not require disguise. In presenting this arc, the narrative emphasizes moderation, loyalty, and self-knowledge. It closes the first tale by reaffirming that private constancy may be a truer adventure than public display.
The second tale shifts to a more legendary register, set among rugged coasts and bogland where folklore threads through daily speech. Its central figure, Dhoya, is a solitary man marked by an uncertain past and by the reserve that comes from living at society’s edges. Neighbors speak of quarrels long remembered and of omens glimpsed at dusk, though the narrative keeps to observable moments and stated errands. A chance encounter on the road draws Dhoya into the concerns of others. The weather and the land set the mood, while brief, guarded conversations hint at loyalties that outlast comfort or safety.
Drawn by duty as he understands it, Dhoya crosses moor and mountain with a companionable silence that leaves his thoughts largely unspoken. Along the way, he meets a household troubled by an old grievance and a young woman whose calm presence steadies harsh talk. Stories of oath and recompense surface, and small tokens carry meanings that are not entirely explained. The path leads toward a settlement where a reckoning has been postponed, and the air seems full of watchers, natural and otherwise. The tale gathers tension through approach rather than argument, guiding Dhoya to a choice that cannot be deferred.
The conclusion arrives with the stark simplicity of a ballad: a confrontation, a word held or broken, and the enduring quiet that follows. Without elaborating consequences, the narrative suggests the costs of honoring private law when public custom runs another way. Dhoya’s bearing remains consistent, spare and dignified, and the final scene is shaped as much by landscape and weather as by speech. Ending on a note of sober clarity, the volume pairs this austere, folkloric closure with the earlier domestic resolution. Together the two works explore belonging and choice in different keys, one grounded in realism, the other in legend.
Historical Context
John Sherman; and, Dhoya was published in 1891, and its settings traverse late Victorian Ireland and London. John Sherman unfolds in a thinly veiled Sligo—Yeats’s beloved northwest seaport—rendered as a commercial town with a rural hinterland of small tenants and fishermen. Its temporal horizon is the mid-to-late 1880s, when land agitation, electoral mobilization, and emigration were reshaping everyday life. Dhoya turns to the mythic West, invoking a timeless, rural Ireland whose customs, holy places, and beliefs persisted despite modernization. Together they stage the contrast between a clerical, urbanizing empire-capital and a west-coast society marked by poverty, memory, and communal bonds.
The Irish northwest provides landscapes—Knocknarea, Ben Bulben, tidal flats, and small farms—alongside a town economy tied to the port of Sligo, rail connections (opened to Dublin in 1862), and merchant houses. London appears as a vast bureaucratic organism of offices and rented rooms, emblematic of the metropolis Yeats knew after moving there in 1887. The books’ social setting includes Anglican and Catholic communities navigating the decline of landlord power, expanding franchises, and the pull of wage labor. This time and place foreground migration pathways from Connacht to London, and tensions between traditional rural solidarities and the competitive, impersonal rhythms of late Victorian urban life.
The Great Famine (1845–1849) devastated Connacht, including Sligo, through potato blight, disease, and mass evictions. Ireland’s population fell from over 8 million in 1841 to about 6.5 million by 1851, with mortality and emigration reshaping families, landholding, and memory. Sligo’s port witnessed famine-era emigrant traffic to Liverpool and North America. In the 1880s, communities still bore scars in population loss and precarious agrarian economies. John Sherman situates characters in a society formed by post-Famine demographic decline and economic caution. Dhoya, with its evocation of haunted landscapes and resilient folkways, mirrors how famine memory could fuse with mythic time in the West’s collective imagination.
Landlordism and the restructuring of property after the Famine transformed rural life. The Encumbered Estates Acts (1848–1849) facilitated the sale of indebted estates, producing new proprietors and shifting landlord-tenant dynamics. Subsequent reforms—the Irish Church Act (1869) disestablishing the Church of Ireland, and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881—edged toward “the three Fs” (fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale). In Connacht, smallholdings and arrears kept tensions high. Yeats’s Sligo-inspired town sits between mercantile respectability and a countryside negotiating these reforms. John Sherman’s social world—shopkeepers, clerks, and small proprietors—emerges from that reconfigured hierarchy, while Dhoya’s rural frame reflects the persistence of customary ties amid legal change.
The Irish Land War (1879–1882) began amid bad harvests and depression. Michael Davitt founded the Irish National Land League in October 1879 at Castlebar, County Mayo; Charles Stewart Parnell became its political figurehead. Tactics included rent strikes, mass meetings, and ostracism—made famous by the 1880 “boycotting” of Captain Charles Boycott in Lough Mask, Mayo. Violence and intimidation occurred alongside constitutional agitation. This conflict directly shaped west-coast society—Sligo families felt its economic and psychological pressures. John Sherman mirrors a small-town middle class seeking stability while living beside unrest; Dhoya channels the West’s imaginative endurance that outlasted crisis, transfiguring social fear and solidarity into a myth-laden moral landscape.
State response escalated with coercion. The Protection of Person and Property (Coercion) Act (1881) enabled detention without trial; “suspects,” including Davitt, were imprisoned. Parnell’s “No Rent Manifesto” radicalized confrontation until the 1882 Kilmainham Treaty sought compromise on rent arrears. Days later, the Phoenix Park murders (6 May 1882) by the Invincibles—killing Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke—shocked Britain and Ireland, tarnishing nationalist momentum. For provincial towns, the lesson was caution: political convulsions could disrupt trade and community. John Sherman’s prudential ethos and its preference for personal reconciliation over confrontation reflect these post-1882 recalibrations, while Dhoya sublimates social violence into fate and supernatural causality.
The Home Rule question intensified after the Third Reform Act (1884) and the Redistribution Act (1885), which expanded the electorate and reshaped constituencies. Gladstone’s First Home Rule Bill (1886) was defeated 343–313, splitting Liberals and energizing Ulster unionism. In the West, agrarian agitation intersected with constitutional nationalism, while business owners fretted about instability. Emigrants in London followed these debates, shaping diaspora politics. John Sherman’s oscillation between a provincial town and the imperial capital registers Home Rule-era dilemmas: attachment to local loyalties versus metropolitan opportunity. The book’s quiet realism tracks a society learning to negotiate political mass movements without surrendering personal prudence, economic survival, or communal cohesion.
The Parnell crisis (1890–1891) fractured Irish nationalism. After The Times’s 1887 “Parnellism and Crime” allegations collapsed with Richard Pigott’s confession and suicide in 1889, Parnell was briefly vindicated. Yet Captain O’Shea’s divorce case (November 1890) exposed Parnell’s affair with Katharine O’Shea, prompting clerical condemnation and a split in the Irish Parliamentary Party. Bitter street politics, contested conventions, and electoral setbacks followed; Parnell died in October 1891. Yeats wrote amid this drama, and publication coincided with its aftermath. John Sherman’s reticence toward grand gestures reflects the costs of hero-centered politics; Dhoya’s tragic-mythic tones suggest how communities processed scandal through older, impersonal narratives of fate and rupture.
Arthur Balfour’s Irish policy pursued “killing Home Rule by kindness.” The 1891 Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act established the Congested Districts Board to relieve poverty in the West through land purchase, fisheries, and infrastructure. It funded piers, seed distribution, and craft industries across counties like Mayo, Galway, and parts of Sligo. While coercion persisted (notably the 1887 Act), development projects sought to stabilize smallholders. Dhoya’s west-of-Ireland milieu aligns with regions targeted by such schemes; its emphasis on isolated communities and marginal livelihoods reflects the conditions the Board tried to ameliorate. John Sherman’s town, a regional market center, stood to benefit indirectly as hinterland purchasing power slowly improved.
