From the Call for Papers:
William Butler Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm in December 1923. This was an event that in many ways solidified Yeats’s place as one of the writers of the twentieth century,
both home and abroad. The award placed him in the company of such luminaries as Rabindranath Tagore, Rudyard Kipling and Knut Hamsun, and later laureates have ranged from Samuel Beckett and Winston Churchill to Seamus Heaney and last year’s winner, Annie Ernaux. The award was an important event in Yeats’s life, associated both with the elevated (in Yeats’s memories of the lavish ceremony) and the mundane (as in anecdotes, such as the one involving the Yeatses cooking sausages
to celebrate the news of the award). Both Yeats’s lecture delivered to the Swedish Royal Academy, ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’, and his travelogue ‘The Bounty of Sweden’, are significant parts of
his oeuvre, the former particularly due to the way in which he selectively singled out Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge when commemorating ‘the labours, triumphs and troubles of my fellowworkers’
in the establishment of the Abbey Theatre.
This academic conference, organized in tandem by the International Yeats Society and the English Department at Stockholm University, will celebrate the centenary of Yeats’s award. We invite papers on a range of topics related to Yeats and the Nobel Prize, and we are especially interested in papers that address the theme of elevation.
Please contact Anna Swärdh for details.
NORSES 