Ireland’s bankruptcy and Yeats’s econo-literary ‘counter-truth’ in Countess Kathleen (1892)

The personal, domestic, and social effects of bankruptcy in Irish history have been painfully experienced by the Irish people both before and after the 1800 Act of Union between Ireland and England. The innumerable voices that took part in the debate created an inexhaustibly econo-literary polyphony with many consonant and dissonant stances. William Butler Yeats’s first 1892 edition of his early verse drama The Countess Kathleen (in all subsequent modified editions The Countess Cathleen) articulates a counter-truth against the circular logic that bankruptcy is the only cure for Ireland and it must be applied to it in the form of a consummation.