(Un)Masking Red Hanrahan: Reconsidering Yeats as a Short Story Writer (for the late Professor Daniel Albright)

Abstract

Confronted with the questions of why the study of Stories of Red Hanrahan still remains a relatively uncharted territory in the field and whether this overdue interest in and scholarly inattention to the stories can ever symptomatically point to a direction for a future Yeats studies to take, this article examines Yeats as a short story writer alongside the discussion of the stories. My argument here is that Red Hanrahan stands in for Yeats as a poet who is feeling his way in his own Romantic quest as a “rebel.” Such a poet is deeply rooted in the folkloric tradition but recreates himself to be “modern,” “innovative,” and “shocking” as well. It is the way in which Yeats at once masks and unmasks Red Hanrahan, not completely severed from the Irish communal folkloric tradition but figuring as a Romantic poet who emerges at a moment of national crisis with his passionate intensity and uncompromising self-sacrifice that can redeem the sterility or loss of idealism of his culture ? a central theme in the writings of his final years. 예이츠연구에서 소외된 레드한라한 스토리 읽기를 통해 초기 예이츠문학의 면모와 이후 변화 발전하는 예이츠 시학의 뿌리를 살펴본다. 레드 한라한 스토리는 단순히 아일랜드의 전승민담과 신화를 바탕으로 민족주의자로서의 예이츠의 면모를 보여주기보다, 작가 개인의 창조적 변용과 끊임없이 변화하고 진화하는 예술적 재능을 보여주는 예라 할 수 있다.