Irish Literary Revival Research Articles

Finding Shaw Among His Irish and Chinese Contemporaries (The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters)

Finding Shaw Among His Irish and Chinese Contemporaries (<i>The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters</i>)

A Study of Irish Cultural Identity in J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea

John Millington Synge (1871-1909) is one of the most outstanding Irish playwrights. He is known for his realistic vision and authentic contributions to Irish drama. He was one of the earliest realistic writers to represent Irish society brilliantly in his plays. One of his greatest contributions has been his association with the Irish Literacy Revival. The Irish Literary Revival also called the Irish Literary Renaissance or Celtic Twilight began around 1885 and ended during the early twentieth century. Though the primary aim of this movement was to gain home rule and independence from England, it also resulted in vigorous literary productions. Writers and scholars struggled to create works that were authentically and originally Irish. Here Synge played an active and key role in writing plays in stylized peasant dialect. He was a prominent figure in the Abbey Theatre of Ireland, founded in 1903 by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, which opened its doors in 1904. Thus, he contributed immensely to the development of modern Irish drama and left an indelible impression on Irish literature. This paper aims to analyze Synge’s role in the Irish Literary Renaissance and the formation of Irish cultural identity vis-a-vis his play Riders to the Sea. Riders to the Sea (1904) is a one-act tragic play that contains both modern and classical elements of tragedy. This play deals with the sorrows and predicaments of human beings on Aran Island. The paper will further explore the representation of Irish peasant society which is based upon his keen observation of the sufferings, perils, and traditions of Irish people during his staying in Aran Island.

History and Religious Imagination: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Revival—an Overview

ABSTRACT An overview of Bernard Shaw’s involvement in early twentieth-century Irish history, both political and cultural. Pressure building since the death of Parnell in 1891 would lead to Ireland’s independence from Britain and the establishment of the Irish free State in 1922, with Shaw’s Irish friends Horace Plunkett, Augusta Gregory, George Russell (“Æ”), and especially W. B. Yeats all prime movers in major new national cultural institutions that sprang up around the turn of the century. Through these four as well as his Irish wife, Charlotte Shaw, Shaw became involved in both the affairs of the nation as well as in Irish drama, especially Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats and his work were particularly important for Shaw’s contributions to the Irish literary revival, in which, whether in satirical, comic, or tragic modes, his Irish plays comprehend Irish mythology, history, imagination, and religious salvation.

Introduction

Introduction

‘Ourselves Alone’? Encounters Between the Irish Literary Revival and Australian Settler-Modernisms, ca. 1913–1919

‘Ourselves Alone’? Encounters Between the Irish Literary Revival and Australian Settler-Modernisms, ca. 1913–1919

Circulation in Comparative and World Literature: How the Irish Literary Revival was Received by the Chinese May Fourth Generation

Abstract My article uncovers themes of circulation in comparative literature regarding how the early twentieth-century Chinese May Fourth generation read and translated the literature produced by the Irish Literary Revival, in a reciprocal process. I discern Postcolonial Modernism as the answer the Irish Revivalists discovered to the twin evils of Colonial Modernity and Capitalism Modernity and read this as an alternative modernizing model for the Chinese writers, one that does not automatically assume that the Irish, or the Chinese, are subaltern or “other.” I accessed archives in the databases of the Wan Qing qikan quanwen shujuku (1833–1911) 晚清期刊全文数据库 (Late Qing dynasty periodical full-text database 1833–1911), the Minguo shiqi qikan quanwen shujuku (1911–1949) 民 国时期期刊全文数据库 (Chinese Republican era periodical full-text database 1911–1949) alongside the Quanguo Baokan Suoyin 全国报刊索引 (National Newspaper Index). These Chinese-language journals formed a material link between the Irish Renaissance and the Chinese Enlightenment. I discovered many Irish Revivalist plays, once translated by Chinese intellectuals, took on new meanings, crossed class, gender, and racial boundaries and were performed by Chinese peasants throughout China, during the 1920s and 1930s.

Eglantina Remport, Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics

The impact of the Irish Literary Revival on the development of English and Irish language literature in Ireland and on modern literary criticism cannot be overestimated. Albeit challenging to quantify in its totality, critical appraisal of the Revival and its key figures are wide-ranging. They take the form of biographies on the life and work of individual artists and thinkers: Roy Foster’s tome on W. B. Yeats (W. B. Yeats, A Life, vol. II, The Arch-Poet, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003...

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ВЖИВАННЯ ІРЛАНДИЗМІВ В ІРЛАНДСЬКІЙ АНГЛІЙСЬКІЙ ПЕРІОДУ ІРЛАНДСЬКОГО ЛІТЕРАТУРНОГО ВІДРОДЖЕННЯ (КІНЕЦЬ ХІХ – ПОЧАТОК ХХ СТОЛІТТЯ)

The article deals with the analysis of borrowings from the Irish language in Irish English within the period of the Irish literary revival (end of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century) borrowed in the context of linguo-cultural communication. The article also examines the factors that affect the dynamics and productivity of such borrowings, among which – the absence of competitive equivalents in English, a necessity to establish social contacts between English and Irish speakers and cultures, the revival of Irish autochthonous elements, and others. Four main historic periods of borrowings in the course of Anglo-Irish contacts are schematically outlined with the article concentrating on the third period, i.e. the Gaelic Revival. The material for the article is based on the literary texts of the English-speaking Irish authors of late 19th and early 20th cc. (William Butler Yeats, Isabella Augusta Gregory (Lady Gregory), George William Russell (alias AE) and John Millington Synge). The peculiar features of Irish borrowings, their use and functions were examined as well. The expedience for a further study of borrowing tendencies and assimilation of Irish vocabulary in Irish English was substantiated, which would contribute to understanding the mechanisms and consequences of linguistic and cultural interaction in Ireland.

Ireland, Modernism, and Imperialism in Standish O’Grady’s The Queen of the World

Abstract Standish O’Grady’s narratives of Irish mythology have been regarded as the inaugural works of the Irish literary revival, with considerable dispute among scholars as to the nature of O’Grady’s influence. In 1900, O’Grady published a futuristic fantasy entitled The Queen of the World under the pseudonym Luke Netterville. This work has been largely neglected in studies of the Irish revival and its relations to the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. The following essay examines the modernist aspects of O’Grady’s novel in relation to contrary tendencies towards imperialism and rebellion that it exhibits. In the process, I discuss the fantastic, gothic, and racial aspects of The Queen of the World, particularly as they reflect the complex nature of O’Grady’s political thought and influence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This includes discussion of the novel’s affinities with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race as well as Irish gothic works by Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. I address the Chinese dimension of the novel in terms of Orientalism and the British Empire, while also considering it in the context of O’Grady’s influence on Patrick Pearse, leader of the 1916 rebellion against British rule in Ireland.

일제 강점기 아일랜드 번역극의 탈식민성 : 『월출』과 『옥문』을 중심으로

This study examines the post-colonial aspects of Korean translations of two Irish plays, The Rising of the Moon and The Gaol Gate, which were performed and published in Korea during the Japanese occupation. The Rising of the Moon and The Gaol Gate were written by Lady Augusta Gregory, a leader in the Irish Literary Revival. They were translated into Korean by Jeong-Woo Choi and performed by the Korea Theatre Arts Research Association and the Paskyula in the 1930s. This study explores the translation shifts in Choi’s translation of The Rising of the Moon and The Gaol Gate through post-colonial theory. This study reveals that postcolonialism, indirectly implied in the ST, is accentuated in the TT, and new postcolonial narratives appear in the TT. Translator Choi exposes the Japanese government’s cruel and unfair colonial rule of Korea. The TT dramatizes the postcolonial aspects in which the characters overcome the identities assigned to them under the colonial rule. This reflects Choi’s political objective of enlightening the Koreans under the Japanese colonial rule.

Re-evaluating Lady Gregory in Modern Irish Literature: A Feminist Ethics Study

Women’s subordinate status in twentieth-century Irish literature has come under criticism in recent years. Irish women’s subjugation becomes apparent when we compare W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory. Whereas Yeats has been universally acknowledged in the past few decades as the spokesman of the Irish Literary Revival and an icon of modern Irish literature, Lady Gregory was ridiculed by George Bernard Shaw as the helping maid of the Abbey Theater. In this paper, a textual analysis of Lady Gregory’s plays is brought into discussion with Carol Gilligan’s and Nel Noddings’s feminist ethics to further explore the role women played in modern Irish literature. This paper aims at clarifying the nature of female writing as exemplified in Lady Gregory’s works. Unlike traditional studies on Lady Gregory and her plays, which focus on women’s subjugation in the male-dominated Irish society around the early twentieth century, the main findings of this research help shed new lights on the value of women in Gregory’s plays via an ethical feminist approach. The implication of this study is that women, who are apparently disempowered in traditional male-oriented moral thinking, are much more valuable and powerful when they are evaluated from ethical feminism.

“Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount”: Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing

AbstractThis essay studies the literary politics of the reception of Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing, theatre, and public culture. Often conceived as a project of recovery or restitution, or as a niche interest for urban élites, the mixed fortunes and contrasting politics of Shakespeare and Spenser in 20th‐ and 21st‐century Ireland testify to the still sensitive politics of settlement and plantation, as well as the blind spots of nationalism and the national model of Irish literature. Focussing primarily on the current century, this essay traces crucial lines of reception back to W. B. Yeats and the Irish literary revival, pausing over Frank McGuinness's important play Mutabilitie (1997), which dared to imagine and provocatively recast both Shakespeare and Spenser's habitation in Ireland. That project found little support, just months before the Good Friday agreement was signed, but it stands over and guides a significant body of work in Irish drama and poetry in ways that have yet to be fully unpacked. Yet the contrast remains between the hero and the whipping boy, a congenial Shakespeare and a cruel Spenser, in literary engagements with Tudor Ireland. Although Shakespeare has generally been heralded as an enabling or emancipatory figure for Irish writers, this essay proposes that a richer and more radical politics can be accessed by the thornier route of confronting Spenser's place in Irish culture and history. The essay concludes by outlining a recent flourishing of interest in Spenser that seeks to exploit his potential for Irish culture and politics in these new, more honest but more challenging ways.

Radical &amp; Free: Musings on the Religious Life by Brian O’Leary (review)

standards of UCD Press. It will be welcomed as an important addition to Joycean scholarship by Irish writers. Moreover, it should find a place in any library devoted to the Irish Literary Revival and the history of modernism in Ireland, as well as to life and culture in Victorian and Edwardian Dublin. Vivien Igoe deserves the gratitude of the many readers and scholars who will be delighted by what she has done. Peter Costello is an author and editor, with specialised interest in the life and work of James Joyce, on whom he has written extensively. Radical & Free: Musings on the Religious Life, Brian O’Leary SJ, (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2016), 98 pages. Brian O’Leary’s book provides a short but very engaging exploration of religious life, with a focus on the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience. Despite its relative brevity, this collection of theological, spiritual, historical, psychological and personal insights gives the book a variegated feel, hinted at in the word ‘Musings’ in the subtitle. Much of the content is taken from a series of talks the author gave to consecrated persons in 2014, during the church’s Year for Consecrated Life. The book serves to inform and renew the reader’s understanding and living of the vows. It does so first by unveiling the original inspiration and biblical wisdom behind each of the evangelical counsels. It also offers an array of positive suggestions as to how religious can authentically live the vows today. These suggestions strive to be faithful to both the foundational impulse of the desert fathers and mothers ‘to renounce’, and contemporary demands on religious life and mission. Radical and Free can therefore be considered as both spiritual reading for anyone who wishes to engage with the question of how they live their vows, and as a source of valuable information for anyone who simply wishes to further their understanding and appreciation of religious life. In chapter one the author reaches back to the time of the nascent Christian church, the age of martyrdom, and the desert fathers and mothers, to offer a critical discussion of the historical origins of religious life. He also traces how the singular decision ‘to renounce’ evolved in time into the triad of evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience that we have come Studies • volume 107 • number 425 132 Spring 2018: Book Reviews to recognise as the hallmarks of religious life. The following six chapters can be read as three two-chapter pairs, unearthing the biblical wisdom and witness which underpins each of the vows and exploring contemporary ways of both understanding and authentically living those vows. In the case of both celibacy and poverty, the author notes how they have been presented in the scriptures as evils as well as goods. Obedience is explored through the biblical portrayal of creation and specific personalities, seen as being and living under the authority of God. As a general observation, the biblical roots of all the evangelical counsels become clearer as the missionary life of the church kicks into gear. In his discussion of the contemporary living of the vows, the author naturally attends to their apostolic value. What this reader appreciated more, however, was how pastorally attuned the author is to how the vowed life can serve the personal and relational needs of consecrated persons themselves: obedience is linked to self-acceptance (Is 45,9-11), chastity is presented as a living of life with God and others in a spirit of intimacy and mutuality, and poverty is shown as a way of allowing oneself to depend on others. The author’s years of experience show in his knowledge of the history and theology of religious life as well as his familiarity with how different religious institutes have adapted the ideals of religious life to their specific context. In that respect this book it is a useful resource for the ongoing processes of ressourcement and of aggiornamento called for by the Second Vatican Council. The introduction left this reader with the impression that the audiences of the original lectures consisted predominantly of older Irish religious people. This book, however, is a timely reminder to younger and older religious people...

'"A Juggler's Trick'": The Pastoralism of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice

'"A Juggler's Trick'":The Pastoralism of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice Cody D. Jarman Countless recollections and historical accounts of 1940s Ireland cite Eamon de Valera's 1943 St. Patrick's Day speech, in which he envisions the country as "the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit."1 The parochial exceptionalism of this vision is deeply entrenched in anxieties regarding the young nation's relationship to a burgeoning global order—or, to put it more aptly, a global disorder—manifested by World War II. De Valera's Ireland was a natural offspring of the more Arnoldian currents of the Irish Literary Revival's anticolonial pastoral aesthetic, which envisioned Ireland as organic, rustic, and rooted, a peasant nation of priestly farmers set adrift in a world marred by the materialism and exploitation of industrial capitalism and imperialism. For de Valera, this narrative had a politically expedient sentimental and populist appeal. Ireland is not only posited as spiritually elevated over the rest of the world, but also unified through a shared imaginary experience of the pastoral space; the nation and neutrality are embedded in individual notions of sanctity and a life lived in touch with the land. Political machinations aside, this imagined Ireland had a discernible impact on the poetry of place written by two of the most significant Irish poets of the war era, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice. In a dialogue with the political pastoralism of the young nation, Kavanagh and MacNeice tap into divergent elements of the poetic pastoral. Kavanagh tends to align himself with de Valera's vision by embracing pastoralism's stark binaries; MacNeice's poetry troubles the positions of the Irish government, focusing on the pastoral's dialectical qualities and the interdependence and interpenetration of seemingly distinct places and ideas. It is no surprise that Kavanagh and MacNeice have divergent approaches to the wartime pastoral. Simon Workman, writing in Irish Culture and Wartime [End Page 65] Europe (2015), observes that the overwhelming differences between the two Irishmen's biographies and characterizations as literary figures have led them to be "seen as occupying opposite ends of a poetic spectrum."2 This can be attributed to their resonances with two of the most prominent archetypes of the modern artist. Kavanagh seems the perfect type for the parochial figure, firmly enmeshed in his native land and struggling against the cultural conformity and pretensions of mid-twentieth century Ireland. MacNeice is the urbane exile with an elite English education, musing on home, homelessness, and modern politics. In this sense, the two poets are united by their difference; both are engaged, as Alan Gillis writes, in "negotiating with modernism," even though they attempt their negotiations from fundamentally different social and cultural vantage points.3 World War II provides a useful shared experience for understanding these two dissimilar Irish writers who, according to Workman, were drawn "into closer alignment than might have been expected."4 One way this aesthetic alignment manifested itself was a shared turn to the pastoral tradition, and the often-nebulous pastoral border in particular, to articulate the wartime experience in neutral Ireland. In general, the pastoral is defined as literature that presents an idealized vision of the countryside and the supposedly simpler form of life that goes on there. The pastoral was, from its very beginnings in the work of Classical poets like Theocritus, an urban form that depicted the countryside as an unspoiled alternative to urban life. This escape was epitomized in Virgil's imaginary rural region, Arcadia. His Arcadia is a paradise of rural beauty and simple life in tune with the seasons. The pastoral tradition, however, frequently pushes back against its own simplicity. In its incessant assertion of binaries between the rural and the urban, or simple and complex, modes of life, the pastoral contains a constant acknowledgment of its own undoing. Judith Haber argues the pastoral is a mode that works "insistently against itself … from the beginning of the genre, presence, continuity, and consolation have been seen as related to—indeed as dependent on—absence, discontinuity, and...

Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV)

Studies • volume 106 • number 422 221 Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV) Sean Brophy Women and the independence movement The narrative of events in the movement to Irish independence is largely concerned with men: poets, soldiers and politicians. This is odd, given that the Fenian manifesto of 1867 and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 espoused gender equality. Moreover, despite the fact that women over thirty only got the right to vote in 1918, many women participated in all phases of the movement. In its cultural phase, the so-called Irish Revival, we encounter the pioneering contribution of the writer and historian Emily Lawless. She wrote on the famines of 1846 and 1847 and the social conditions of rural Ireland in the run up to the first Home Rule Bill. It is arguable that her rhetoric and forensic attention to detail made more impact on William Gladstone than had Daniel O’Connell in his day on Robert Peel. She uses the idea of a Famine road to capture images of a county inspector in Galway picking up 150 bodies of families who had just lain down and died on a single stretch of road. Her prose is heartbreaking: Think of the separate hell gone through by each individual father and mother of all that starving multitude. And when all hope was over, that end that must have been so welcome, because there were none left to live for, think of the lying down to watch the vanishing away of this familiar green landscape in the last grey mists of death.1 Lady Gregory and Maud Gonne Lady Augusta Gregory was another major figure in the Irish Literary Revival who was determined to show her compatriots how they could find their own voice and shed their mask of what O’Connell might have described as cowering people, acting their part as quarrelsome, vulgar, rollicking buffoons to entertain their imperial masters. Her most notable contributions were her play Cathleen Ní Houlihan, first produced in collaboration with WB Yeats in 1902, and the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1905. Gregory blended ideas from the United Irishmen of 1798, the Fenians of Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV) 222 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 1867 and a non-materialist Celtic spirituality in her play, an allegory in which Ireland features as an old woman, who inspires heroic male figures. The first production, with Maud Gonne as the old woman, was a great success. Gonne herself had founded Inighinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) in 1900 to raise the consciousness and cultural ideals of young women towards complete independence of Ireland. As early as 1902 we see that the seeds of revolution were being sown by her and Lady Gregory. Cathleen Ní Houlihan represents the Irish nation. The character Michael questions her about what hope she has to hold on to and she replies, ‘The hope of getting my beautiful fields back again: the hope of putting the strangers out of my house’. How will she do that? Michael, who epitomises the young men who will eventually fight in the failed Rising of 1916 and what followed, asked. The Old Woman speaks of ‘the good friends who will help me’. Now she must go to meet them. ‘I will go with you’, Michael says.2 Kathleen Lynn Almost 100 women served alongside the men during the Easter Rising, in medical, catering and military roles. Some went on to participate in the political phase that followed. Kathleen Lynn, for example, was active in the women’s suffrage movement and the 1913 labour troubles. She was chief medical officer to the Irish CitizenArmy at the time of the Rising and secondin -command to Sean Connolly of the garrison in City Hall. She took over command after he was shot and led her volunteers until they were ordered to surrender. After the Rising she was jailed in England and, on her return home, became vice-president of the executive of Sinn Féin and was elected a Sinn Féin TD in 1923 but did not take her seat because of her opposition to the Treaty. Aside from politics, she...

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic": J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic":J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival John Brannigan (bio) Dec. 1. I have been reading Herbert Spencer and my creed is now very simple. Humanity has evolved from the conditions of the world, and will return to the nothing it has come from. Each separate life is but a ripple on the waves,—a blade of grass on the roadside. For those who fail, there is no hope. They are like the dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution. In my useless agony I am only hurtful to my fellows. Why should I endure it?1 John Synge's "Étude Morbide," written around 1899, takes the form of "an imaginary portrait," and thus does not pretend to provide autobiographical statements of any authority.2 There are shades here of the Bohemian student who had spent much of the 1890s in Germany, Italy, and France studying European culture, but within a few years Synge had established himself as the most gifted playwright of the Irish literary revival, before his early death from Hodgkin's disease in 1909. The author of Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Synge's transformation was rooted in his immersion in the language and folklore of the West of Ireland, particularly the Aran Islands. However, in reflecting the impact of evolutionary debates about humanity and degeneration upon the sensibility of the artist, "Étude Morbide" provides some indications of how we might contextualize Synge's encounters with the primitive and the aboriginal on the Aran Islands in relation to his contemporaneous preoccupations with the legacies of Darwinism.3 Synge's choice of [End Page 329] metaphors for the figure of bare humanity are conventional—"a ripple on the waves … a blade of grass on the roadside"—yet distinctly apt given the propensity in his writings for the sea and the roadside as topographical markers of marginal modernity. Similarly, "those who fail" are likened, somewhat predictably, to "dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution," an image resonant with W. B. Yeats's later reference to "those our civilization must reject," and only ameliorated by Synge's identification of himself with the doomed failures of humanity.4 The work to which Synge refers, Spencer's Principles of Psychology (published in 1855, four years prior to Darwin's The Origin of the Species), argues that "life attains to more and more perfect forms" through an evolutionary process in which the "unfit" fail to survive, and the "fit" progress more and more towards an ideal or archetype.5 It is a "creed" which the artist finds incontestable, but which engenders despondency. At least on a personal level, however, relief from this despondency lies at the margins of modernity: May 5. I am in the country at last—near the end of Finisterre. Since I came here my daily readings of the saints and Stoics have lost their interest, and I live simply and naturally as the peasants do. This ordeal I have passed through has left me without a trace of apprehension. My system saved me, yet when I look back on it now, it seems a childish escapade. I have my fiddle here and I make the peasants dance in the evenings. My skin shivers while I play to see that in spite of the agony of the world there are still men and women joyous enough to leap and skip with exultation. (Synge, "Étude Morbide," 32–33) As James Knapp argues, Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) depicts his encounters with the "primitivism" of the islanders in much the same terms, but without "the tone of weary decadence" notable in his characterization of the artist in Brittany.6 The narrative tone may be refined and clarified, yet the relationship between these cultures "on the edge" of modernity and evolutionary discourses of primitivism, degeneration, and civilization is substantially the same. When Synge turns to Brittany and Aran as sources of cultural renewal it is not as "wild places" beyond the reaches of modernity, but as liminal spaces in an increasingly powerful transatlantic economy, capable...

‘I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early’: The Eternal Circling of Yeats and Joyce

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recasts, several times over, the central affirmation that he is credited with having made to William Butler Yeats during their much mythologised early encounter: “I have met you too late. You are too old.” These words, or a version of them, have framed studies of the Joyce-Yeats relationship which is thereafter construed as endlessly antagonistic, irretrievably oppositional. This essay will seek to challenge those readings which turn a complex relationship into Irish modernism. Critics have seen the encounter between Yeats and Joyce as an “auspicious meeting” as “an original moment, a primal scene of the modernism which both writers were subsequently to play a part in creating.” Their complex relationship can be seen against the ever widening backdrop of the Irish Literary Revival which took place in the tumultuous thirty-year period between 1891 and 1922 as well as in the context of the tension arising from the Romantic pull of the past and the inexorable draw of Modernism. In this context, Yeats and Joyce were seen as having almost entirely separate agendas, visions, and styles, and as irreconcilable antagonists, although both writers contributed, to underlining the differences and gaps rather than the connections between them. Joyce may well have met Yeats too late to deeply influence him but it might also be suggested that Yeats met Joyce too early to really be able to substantially help him.

Hannah Lynch and Narratives of the Irish Literary Revival

Hannah Lynch and Narratives of the Irish Literary Revival

The Traveler as Messenger in Lady Gregory's Kincora and Dervorgilla

This article examines the itinerant figures who perform the role of a messenger in Lady Gregory’s folk-history plays: Kincora and Dervorgilla. The beggar girl in the former and the songmaker in the latter are wanderers living on the margins of Irish society. Due to their unfettered spatial movement, these characters serve as effective messengers between various sectors of Irish society, but especially between the higher and the lower classes. Given that in reality, Travelers are persecuted by the sedentary peasant community, it is ironic that they represent their oppressors in drama. As messengers, the primary function of the stage Travelers in Kincora and Dervorgilla is to deliver the voice of the Irish people to their respective rulers. More importantly, they also act as a moral agent for kings and queens. As the embodiments of traditional folk culture, the beggar and the minstrel stand for Irish nationalism in opposition to Gormleith and Dervorgilla, the two notorious queens who brought foreign forces to Ireland. Lady Gregory’s portrayals of the messenger-Travelers in her folk historical dramas reflect the ethos of cultural nationalism at the core of the Irish Literary Revival in the modern period.

James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie (review)

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie Robert A. Volpicelli James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination, by Michael Patrick Gillespie, pp. 192. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015. $74.95 Exile is written plainly onto the surface of James Joyce’s writings. In the final pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen Dedalus calls upon “silence, exile, and cunning” as the means by which an aspiring poet will gain independence from family and fatherland. The passage conjures the parallel trajectory of its author, who inscribed his own flight from Ireland into the novel by dating the final page: “Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914.” And yet, for all the frankness with which Joyce presents such departures, Michael Patrick Gillespie’s latest book shows how the familiar concept of exile contains within it unfamiliar complexities—and how our readings of Joyce acquire a new richness when we seek to position both him and his writing in the space between, say, Dublin and Trieste. Critics have long noted that Joyce’s critical stance toward Ireland and his decision to leave home are closely intertwined. According to Gillespie, however, stopping here merely reinforces the reductive portrait of exile that appears in Joyce criticism as well as in Irish studies more broadly. Placing Joyce in a larger tradition of exiled writers (including Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Beckett, and Edward Said), Gillespie’s introduction outlines how exile, whether self-imposed or externally mandated, impacts the aesthetic imagination. In many cases, this experience of displacement introduces into an author’s work an exilic style capable of oscillating between antithetical emotions—detachment and longing, hostility and nostalgia, rancor and sentimentality—when directed at the idea of a lost home. Notably, the emphasis here does not fall on any of exile’s particular emotional states, but rather, on the fact of oscillation itself, which then can be read across Joyce’s entire career in ways that challenge conventional interpretations of his texts. Gillespie’s first chapter is an overview of Joyce’s time abroad that makes strong use of documents like personal letters to show how the Modernist writer saw exile not just as a means of disassociating himself from his homeland, but also as a mode of engaging with it. While acknowledging that Joyce openly denounced Irish institutions like the Catholic church or the Yeats-led Irish Literary Revival, Gillespie primarily seeks to illustrate how attending to the exilic experience in greater detail reveals the “dual, conflicting impulses shading Joyce’s accounts of Ireland and Irish life.” The next chapter fleshes out this claim in readings of Dubliners (1914), a book that Joyce began writing only a few months before he left Ireland, in the summer of 1904. It is easy to read this collection’s final story, “The Dead,” as an apologia for the rest of the book’s harsh treatment of bourgeois Dublin life; yet Gillespie sees that a more nuanced view exists from the start. For example, in a reading of the collection’s first story, “The Sisters,” Gillespie uncovers the mixture of pain and sympathy that undergird [End Page 155] the narrator’s perspective as he stares up at the “faintly and evenly” lit window of the story’s dying priest. The moment is significant, for just when we might expect the priest—a metonym for the church—to find more of Joyce’s contempt, a glimmer of tenderness shines through. It is in dealing with subjects like sympathy, though, that Gillespie’s study could benefit from drawing on a vocabulary tied either to the philosophy of emotion (Adam Smith’s treatise on sympathy immediately comes to mind) or to recent writing on affect and the body (by theorists like Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi, and Patricia Clough). Emotion, in general, might be a stronger thread in this book, especially since the British often leveraged the Celt’s apparent sentimentality into a justification for imperialism. Yet pointing to this potential area of development should not take away from Gillespie’s consistently counterintuitive and instructive readings, such as those contained within his third chapter on Portrait. Starting with Stephen’s stanch disavowal of his nation at...