Author: Barbara Ann Suess<br />File Type: pdf<br />This volume explores the ways in which W.B. Yeatss plays offer an alternative form of progress via a philosophical system of opposites always seeking the opposite, the nature of which changes as we change, we continually augment our personalities, and ultimately improve society, with the inclusion of the other. This system, which eventually became Yeatss doctrine of the mask, provided his contemporaries with a method of changing what science, Platonism, and Victorian bourgeois ideologies claimed to be inescapable qualities of self. Progress and Identity relocates Yeatss literary, social, and political relevance from his essentializing cultural nationalism to his later, more broad-minded definitions of progress.