Ancient Mythology and Revolutionary Ideology in Ireland, 1878–1916

Abstract

Perhaps some justification is needed for yet another study on the literary background of the Easter 1916 Rising. Certainly the ‘high’ literature, represented by such writers as Yeats, AE, Synge and the three insurrection poet-fighters (Pearse, MacDonagh and Plunkett) has already been extensively analysed by a number of scholars. However, it is usually forgotten that numerous ‘popular’ authors were also writing in the forty years before 1916; authors who might be expected, if only by virtue of their numbers, to command a considerable readership. Names such as Joseph Campbell, Ethna Carberry, Nora Hopper, Seumas MacManus, Alice Milligan and Seumas O’Sullivan are unknown today except in occasional references by literary critics, yet these writers produced a great deal of verse on national topics, and were close to the general public and its preoccupations. Their work deserves the attention of historians; for only by identifying common ground between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ literature can one explore with any confidence the complex relationship between that literature as a whole and Irish society during this period. This I hope to do in the following pages.