Studying the Artful Contenders of Empire: The Poetics of the Irish News

Abstract

For those who study Irish history and culture, the Irish Literary Revival (i880-1930) stands out as an era of astonishing riches in both art and activism. Over the course of a generation, a geographically small, thinly populated, economically meager island turned out poets, playwrights, and novelists who are, today, widely regarded as among the most distinctive artists of their age. As W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge were writing for and managing the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre, James Joyce was fleeing his suffocating mother and his provincial hometown of Dublin for a more cosmopolitan locale to write his distinctly Irish modernist fiction. At the same time, militant nationalists joined by trade union organizers and suffrage activists organized, marched, spoke out, and actively fought to create an independent nation. In less than a decade, Ireland's decolonizing struggle initiated a devastating uprising in its capital (Easter 1916), a bloody guerrilla conflict (the Anglo-Irish War, 1919-21), and a civil war (1922-23). For many years after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, students and teachers were held captive by the powerful mythmaking of Yeats, who argued that the cultural revival served as a substitute for political activity. Because of the failure of political leadership (embodied in Charles Stewart Parnell, the discredited head of the Irish Parliamentary Party), men turned to cultural masters like Yeats. In turn, this version of literary history continues, the terrible beauty of Ireland's violent revolution could never have occurred if not for