Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism

During the last two decades, social scientists have rethought what is understood as “animism” by reading the evidences of contemporary animistic ontologies as contrary to the concept of animism inherited from Victorian comparative anthropology. By investigating W. B. Yeats’s antimaterialist plundering of “materialist philosophy” in the service of an animism he refused to acknowledge as such, Garrigan Mattar argues that the time is ripe to rethink our understanding of Victorian acceptations of the animistic. In so doing, she also suggests that the fairies of Yeats’s “Celtic Twilight” are deserving of more rigorous scrutiny than they have hitherto received: in Yeats’s writing, the fairies are peculiarly, respectfully, construed as being part of what we would now call a “relational ontology.”