Selina Guinness (Dun Laoghaire) Ireland through the stereoscope: reading the cultural politics of theosophy in the Irish Literary Revival Leeann Lane DCU) 'There are compensations in the congested districts for their poverty': � and the idealized peasant of the agricultural co-operative movement Liam MacMath�na (DCU) From manuscripts to street signs via S�adna: the Gaelic League and the changing role of literacy in Irish, 1875-1915 "na N� Bhroim�il (Mary Immac.) American influence on the Gaelic League: inspiration or control? Mary Stakelum (UL) A song to sweeten Ireland's wrong: music education and the Celtic Revival Elizabeth Crooke (UU) Revivalist archaeology and museum politics during the Irish Revival Janice Helland (Queen's, King.) Embroidered spectacle: Celtic Revival as aristocratic display Elaine Cheasley Paterson (QUB) Crafting a national identity: the Dun Emer Guild, 1902-8 Marnie Hay (UCD) Explaining Uladh: cultural nationalism in Ulster Lucy McDiarmid (Villanova U) Revivalist belligerence: three controversies Alex Davis (UCC) Whoops from the peat-bog?: Joseph Campbell and the London avant-garde Maria O'Brien (UU) Thomas William Rolleston: the forgotten man G.K. Peatling (Guelph U) Robert Lynd, paradox and the Irish revival: 'Acting-out' or 'Working-through'? Brian Griffin (Bath Spa) The Revival at local level: Katherine Frances Purdon's portrayal of rural Ireland Michael McAteer A currency crisis: modernist dialectics in The Countess Cathleen Mary Burke (QUB) Eighteenth-century European scholarship and nineteenth-century Irish literature: Synge's Tinker's Wedding and the orientalizing of 'Irish Gypsies' Patrick Lonergan (NUIG) 'The sneering, lofty conception of what they call culture': O'Casey, popular culture and the Literary Revival
First published in 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, through the works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey, documents the complex spectrum of political, social and other pressures that helped fashion modern Ireland. At least three sets of cultural assumptions coexisted in Ireland during the years between 1890 and 1930, -- English, Irish and Anglo-Irish, each united by a common language but divided by considerable tensions and strain. The question of Irish identity forms the central theme of the study, and illustrates how it was a major, even obsessive concern for these writers. Subsidiary and interwoven themes constantly recur. Themes such as the concepts of the peasant and the hero, political nationalism, the meaning of Ireland’s history and the validity of her cultural traditions. Rather than use the literature concerned as merely endorsing evidence for a sociological or political thesis, this study allows its major themes and issues to emerge and develop from direct and close study of the work of the writers. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.
In this groundbreaking work, Timothy McMahon reexamines the significance of the Gaelic revival in forming Ireland’s national identity. In their determination to preserve and extend the use of Irish as a spoken language and artistic medium, members of the Gaelic League profoundly influenced Irish culture and literature in the twentieth century. McMahon explores that influence by scrutinizing the ways in which society absorbed their messages, tracing the interaction between the ideas propagated by the League and the variety of meanings ordinary people attached to Ireland and to being Irish. Comparing press and police reports with census data and local directories, the author establishes the first comprehensive profile of League membership. McMahon’s ability to access both English- and Irish-language sources offers readers a rare and richly detailed analysis of primary materials. Grand Opportunity addresses questions that are central to understanding modern Irish identity and makes an indispensable contribution to the wider study of national identity formation.
This collection charts the vital contextual backgrounds to James Joyce's life and writing. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.
This book reconsiders the Celtic Revival by examining appropriations of Shakespeare, using close readings of works by Arnold, Dowden, Yeats and Joyce to reveal the pernicious manner in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics informed the critical paradigms that mediated the reading of Shakespeare in Ireland for a generation.
In Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle examines the impact of anthropology on the work of Irish Revivalists such as W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge and James Joyce. Castle argues that anthropology enabled Irish Revivalists to confront and combat British imperialism, even as these Irish writers remained ambivalently dependent on the cultural and political discourses they sought to undermine. Castle shows how Irish Modernists employed textual and rhetorical strategies first developed in anthropology to translate, reassemble and edit oral and folk-cultural material. In doing so, he claims, they confronted and undermined inherited notions of identity which Ireland, often a site of ethnographic curiosity throughout the nineteenth-century, had been subject to. Drawing on a wide range of post-colonial theory, this book should be of interest to scholars in Irish studies, post-colonial studies and Modernism.
James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson.