Paperback of A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision"

The paperback of A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision" is now available

The paperback version of A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision" is out from Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool Universtiy Press, with a price tag of $49.95 in the US and £30 in the UK — still not exactly cheap, but a little more affordable, and with a few corrections!

Review of A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision" by Claire Nally in International Yeats Studies . 

A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision"—Update and Discount

 A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision" is available now from Amazon in the US and in the UK, with slight savings, but also with good previews of the early chapters. They use the e-book version, which includes colour in a few of the diagrams.

 

Click here for a link to the full flyer

Discounts of 30% are available by ordering directly from—
Liverpool University Press, with the code: LUP30
or Oxford University Press (in the US and the Americas), with the code: ADISTAS

A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision"

A Reader's Guide to Yeats's 'A Vision' has just been published.
UPDATE AND ORDER DISCOUNT

JUST PUBLISHED by Clemson University Press —
a new introduction to the context and system of A Vision

A READER'S GUIDE TO YEATS'S A VISION

CONTENTS

Background

1 Overview: The Book of A Vision

2 Genesis: Making and Remaking A Vision

3 Background: Antecedents and Assumptions

Foundations

4 Presentation: Gyres and Geometry

5 Spirits: Determinism and Free Will

6 Being: Human and Divine

Structure

7 The Faculties: Action and Pursuit

8 The Principles: Reality and Value

9 The Daimon: Opposition and Essence

10 The Divine: One and Many

Process

11 The Circles of Life: Wheels and Rebirth

12 The Twenty-Eight Incarnations: Lives and Phases

13 After Life: Understanding and Preparation

14 History: Cycles and Influx

Epilog

15 Reframing A Vision

Appendix: People in Phases

The cover art is by Jaff Seijas.

With 39 diagrams. An associated glossary of terms and a bibliography are available here.

UPDATE AND ORDER DISCOUNT

A Reader's Guide to Yeats's 'A Vision' by Neil Mann is published by Clemson University Press.
Orders are already shipping from Liverpool University Press for Europe—copies have arrived in Limerick!—and will shortly be available in North America through Oxford University Press.

There is also an e-book available through Liverpool University Press and, at current exchange rates, the sterling price is lower than the dollar equivalent in the United States, though still ridiculously high. The format is PDF and some of the diagrams contain colour for added contrast. Unfortunately the endnotes are not hyperlinked.

Amazon lists the book, but apparently does not have any stock and will not ship for some time. For Europe, copies are best ordered from Liverpool University Press.

An essential book for anyone starting out to read A Vision .... a must-have book for the serious reader of A Vision.     —    Colin McDowell This is research-led teaching at its very best. As the "one deep student" of A Vision, Neil Mann is the perfect companion, and his is a lucid, patient, and uncompromising guide to Yeats's book of such strangeness, candor, and compelling dignity.     —    Warwick Gould Neil Mann provides here a long-needed companion to W. B. Yeats's strange and fascinating text A Vision, to which he will bring a much-deserved wider audience. That for each subject addressed, Mann provides an overview followed by an array of further detail means that A Vision will become more luminous both to new students of Yeats and lifelong devotees. We are fortunate to have such a skilled and knowledgeable Vision scholar as Mann elucidating both the workings of Yeats's system itself and its centrality to his poetry.     —    Catherine E. Paul One hundred years after the first months of the "miracle" that led W. B. Yeats to write A Vision, one of the twentieth century's most difficult treatises has found its first thoroughly reliable and enjoyable guide. In Neil Mann's elegant and comprehensive book, Yeats's "unexplained rule of thumb that somehow explained the world" is explicated without having its essential wildness tamed. Mann is one of the world's most knowledgeable scholars of A Vision, and he has given us a clear and readable book that is a model of balance and erudition. Specialists and general readers of Yeats will turn again and again to this guide with relief and pleasure. Thanks to all spirits that it is here!     —    Margaret Mills Harper

A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision"

UPDATE: PUBLICATION AND OFFERS

One of the reasons for the dormancy of this blog over the last few years has been my focus on writing a book on A Vision. This is not a crowded field and a relatively straightforward introduction to A Vision is one of the gaps in Yeats Studies, so I hope that A Reader's Guide to Yeats's "A Vision" will be a genuine aid to readers new and old.

The book will be published by Clemson University Press, in association with Liverpool University Press in the UK, and should be out at the beginning of 2019.

The cover art is by Jaff Seijas, whose Vision-inspired art I've featured on the blog here before.

It's divided into four sections of three or four chapters each (plus a coda).

Background
1 Overview: The Book of A Vision
2 Genesis: Making and Remaking A Vision
3 Background: Antecedents and Assumptions
Foundations
4 Presentation: Gyres and Geometry
5 Spirits: Determinism and Free Will
6 Being: Human and Divine
Structure
7 The Faculties: Action and Pursuit
8 The Principles: Reality and Value
9 The Daimon: Opposition and Essence
10 The Divine: One and Many
Process
11 The Circles of Life: Wheels and Rebirth
12 The Twenty-Eight Incarnations: Lives and Phases
13 After Life: Understanding and Preparation
14 History: Cycles and Influx
Epilog
15 Reframing A Vision
Appendix: People in Phases

Background starts off looking at the writing and printing history of A Vision's two editions; then the automatic writing and the questions that raises; and then examines the ideas and baggage that the Yeatses brought to the enterprise and what belief meant to Yeats.

Foundations outlines the fundamental framework of A Vision in its duality, the gyre and the wheel; it continues with a consideration of what Yeats saw as the nature of spiritual and human existence, then looks at the human beings and their relationship to the divine and Unity of Being.

Structure devotes a chapter each to the three major elements in Yeats's anatomy of the human being: Faculties, Principles, and Daimon, and then moves on to the divine, including the Thirteenth Cone.

Process then looks at these elements in action, the cycles of individual lives and recurrent lives, the pageant of the incarnations represented by the phases of the moon, the process of the afterlife, and the processes of historical cycles.

The epilogue is a brief assessment of A Vision's significance, its implications, and its meaning for Yeats. An appendix gives a table summarizing the phases that the Yeatses assign to various individuals in A Vision and the automatic script.

The book is quite a bit thinner than the draft that I finished back in May, having lost almost half of its material to reach the agreed length and to be useful as a guide—it might have been rather daunting and less usable. The good news is that I hope to work up some of the bits that I cut to become entries for this blog. The better news is that I was allowed 40 figures and illustrations. Bad news is that it will be almost as hideously priced as A Vision was when it came out in 1925. A Vision A was priced at 3 guineas (this was the fancy way of pricing a privately produced edition, meaning 3 pounds and 3 shillings, just over $15 at that date); this was roughly equivalent to £180 today, around $240. Incidentally, the 1937 edition was 15 shillings, roughly a quarter of the price. So this could be seen as a bargain at half that price (at current exchange the UK edition is looking cheaper). It will, however, be accessible through universities and libraries, and at least partially through search online, and I hope that eventually it will reach a cheaper format.

I shall give updates when I have them, but will start with some new blog entries from unused material.