Irish Literary Revival Research Articles

In Sunlight and in Shadow

In Sunlight and in Shadow Ben Howard (bio) Richard Tillinghast , Finding Ireland: A Poet's Exploration of Irish Literature and Culture. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. 276 pages. $25; David Pierce , Light, Freedom, and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing. Yale University Press, 2005. 350 pages. $40. Irish history casts a long shadow on contemporary Irish culture. Amidst the bright prosperity of recent years that shadow has sometimes receded from view. And in youthful stylish Dublin, with its ubiquitous mobile phones and thriving Internet cafes, it often seems to have vanished. But, in two recent books on Irish history, literature, and culture, the shadow of the past is not only present but very much in the foreground. Richard Tillinghast's Finding Ireland is a gathering of memoirs, travelogues, reviews, "letters from Ireland," and familiar essays, in which the American poet explores Irish culture mainly through the works of modern Irish writers. A longtime sojourner in Ireland, Tillinghast now lives in retirement in County Tipperary. In the manner of an informed "blow-in" speaking to the less informed, he endeavors to cross what he calls the "oceans of sentimentality and prejudice [that] keep us from seeing the Irish in their true complexity." In tones ranging from the professorial to the celebrative to the elegiac, he writes with authority on subjects as diverse as the poetry of Derek Mahon, the fiction of William Trevor, the plays of Brian Friel, the felicities of Irish traditional music, and the surviving pleasures of rural Irish life, where "there is still a place by the fire and a cup of tea for the visitor in a farmhouse kitchen." Though his book has the look of a miscellany, its center of gravity may be found in the poet's intellectual passions, namely Anglo-Irish culture and modern Irish poetry. Jonathan Swift, the first major Anglo-Irish writer, described his people as "strangers in a strange land." And Yeats, two centuries later, spoke of "Anglo-Irish solitude." In "Who Were the Anglo-Irish?" Tillinghast embraces these descriptions, portraying a culture that enjoyed its heyday in the late eighteenth century and declined thereafter, becoming ever more isolated and insecure. Distrusted by the Irish and English alike, the Anglo-Irish lived apart in their [End Page 665] big country houses, watching the Protestant Ascendancy become what Julian Moynahan has called a "Descendancy," its power eroded by Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the Land Law Act of 1881. Yet, as Tillinghast notes, the "existential insecurity" and "heightened awareness" of the Anglo-Irish fostered a "golden age" of Anglo-Irish writing, which includes the novels of Maria Edgeworth; the diaries, letters, and fictions of Somerville and Ross; and the major works of the Irish Literary Revival. Concurrently the "hybrid" nature of Anglo-Irish culture nourished a distinctive literary tradition, beginning with Maria Edgeworth and continuing through the fiction of George Moore, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. "Year by year from 1800 on," writes Tilling-hast, "as their position became less and less tenable, the heart and pluck and humor of those whom Yeats called 'the indomitable Irishry' built from words a hybrid body of work that will stand with the world's best." Turning to specific authors, Tillinghast discusses their distinct contributions to the Anglo-Irish tradition. In "The Uneasy World of Somerville and Ross" he rejects the common view that the coauthors romanticized the Ascendancy and portrayed sentimentalized stage-Irish characters. In Tillinghast's view they offered a "vigorous realism" that extended to their portrayal of servants' lives, and they were "deeply implicated" in the "ironies and tragedies of Irish history." In "The Asymmetrical George Moore" he defines Moore as a "nationalist" who differed "from others in the movement by his complete lack of idealism and patriotic sentiment." In "Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel, and the Child" he opposes the view of Bowen as a class-ridden snob, seeing her instead as a writer who "took the world as she found it." And in his essay on William Trevor he identifies Trevor as a "Protestant-Irish and English" author whose interest lies not in politics, history, and class in...

Rewriting the Past: Historical Pageantry in the Dublin Civic Weeks of 1927 and 1929

Rewriting the Past: Historical Pageantry in the Dublin Civic Weeks of 1927 and 1929 Joan FitzPatrick Dean Pageantry has its origins in ritual public displays and takes on special importance during periods of momentous change. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005) traces the re-emergence of pageantry in late nineteenth-century Europe to philosophers, artists, and anthropologists who operated in the shadow, or the light, of Darwin. Among them were Friedrich Nietzsche, whose The Birth of Tragedy (1872) located the origins of Western drama in the obliteration of the individual, and James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (1890) scandalously stressed “the sameness of all societies and cultures.”1 Nietzsche, Frazer, and others looked back to the ritual origins of theater, long before drama contracted into realism, the narrowly defined dramaturgy of ordinary language set in a comfortably recognizable environment. The fourth wall of realistic theater created a confining dramaturgy that denied and renounced what was, at root, theatrical. Fischer-Lichte surveys the commonalities animating Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival (1876), Pierre de Coubertin’s revitalization of the Olympic Games and Max Reinhardt’s “Theatre of the Five Thousand” (both phenomena in the early decades of the twentieth century), and Leni Riefenstahl’s documentation of Nazi rallies in the early 1930s. These disparate events all staged pageantry to create community through the re-theatricalization of theater. Throughout the twentieth century, pageantry was the most pervasive, far-reaching experience of theater in the lives of ordinary Irish people. The most familiar pageants in Ireland—and elsewhere—are associated with religious commemorations: Christmas and Nativity plays, passion plays, Easter reenactments (including the Quem Quaritis), First Communion and Corpus Christi processions, and the localized celebration of the feast days of saints. In Ireland, the allied confessional, sectarian spectacles such as July 12 parades have venerable [End Page 20] histories.2 Whereas Irish political demonstrations, rallies, protests, marches, sit-ins, and the like have been extensively analyzed, their counterparts in Irish pageantry are neglected by both historians and theater historians. An important exception is Padraic Pearse’s pageantry at St. Enda’s and St. Ita’s, which Mary Trotter, Elaine Sisson, and others have analyzed.3 Noteworthy, too, are James Moran’s Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre and Anne Dolan’s Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 in their treatment of formation and manipulation of historical memory.4 In twentieth-century Ireland, three periods stand out as times when considerable resources were invested by political, governmental, and other authorities to create the historical and mythological pageantry that shaped identity and community. The pageantry associated with all three epitomizes the distinctly modern phenomenon that Eric Hobsbawm called the “invention of tradition,” the construction of symbolic and ceremonial actions to which are imputed venerable histories.5 The first such period occurred during the Irish Literary Revival, partially as a demotic reaction against early Abbey Theatre productions, and partially as a vehicle for nationalist activism that involved large numbers of nonprofessional enthusiasts in pageant production. The second flurry of pageantry occurred in the decade following independence, between 1922 and 1932, when the new Irish Free State deployed pageantry to reinforce its legitimacy, to instill pride in its citizens, and to offer the popular imagination an alternative to an oppressive colonial history. The third period occurred in the mid-1950s in the early seasons of An Tóstal, the hoped-for international homecoming and celebration of the Irish people. Of these three eras, perhaps the most critically neglected period occurred in newly independent Ireland when historical pageantry imbricates theater, nationalist commemoration, and nation-building. Between 1922 and [End Page 21] 1932, the Irish Free State and its citizens undertook four attempts to “resurrect” the Aonach Tailteann or ancient games of Ireland, in 1922, 1924, 1928, and 1932.6 In the same era, they created the many historical pageants of the 1927 and 1929 Dublin Civic Weeks in 1927 and 1929—experiences that whetted the appetite to host the 1932 Eucharistic Congress. Until recently, most critics characterize the Irish Free State in its first decade as, in Seamus Deane’s formulation, a “provincial backwater.”7 More recently...

Another lost cause? Pan-Celticism, race and language

Taking its lead from Slavoj Zizek's recent work, this article suggests that revisiting the ‘lost cause’ of Pan-Celticism may lead us to consider some of the unthinking assumptions involved in the contemporary liberal embrace of a multicultural, ‘civic’, nationalism. This article thus revisits what the historian R. F. Foster describes as a ‘forgotten aspect’ of the Irish literary revival of the 1890s: the Pan-Celtic movement. The late 1880s and 1890s was a time when, despite considerable historical, social and cultural differences, the national question in Ireland, Wales and Scotland had a simultaneous impact on the political and cultural life of Britain. Having traced the uneasy relationship between ‘race’ and ‘language’ manifested in much recent literary criticism back, via Paul Gilroy, Raymond Williams and Hannah Arendt, to the Pan-Celtic debates of the nineteenth century, I conclude by arguing that a genuine multiculturalism in the contemporary nations of the British Isles must register the reality of multilingualism. John Koch notes that it is ‘the scientific fact of a Celtic family of languages that has weathered unscathed the Celtosceptic controversy’. This article's return to the lost cause of Pan-Celticism is an attempt to place the question of linguistic difference at the heart of contemporary cultural debate in order to exposes the intolerance of Anglophone multiculturalism.

Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy in Finnegans Wake : An Annotated List

Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy in Finnegans Wake: An Annotated List Len Platt (bio) We have long known that theosophy was of interest to Joyce, in part because of a well-known local connection—its practice by key figures of the Irish Literary Revival. Charles Johnson, under W. B. Yeats’s influence, met A. P. Sinnett and formed the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1885, an organization that, according to Ernest Augustus Boyd, one of the earliest historians of Irish revivalism, was as vital a factor in the evolution of Anglo-Irish literature as the publication of Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland, the two events being complementary to any complete understanding of the literature of the revival. The Theosophical Movement provided a literary, artistic and intellectual centre from which radiated influences whose effect was felt even by those that did not belong to it.1 Yeats, George Russell, and John Eglinton, all key figures in the Irish Literary Revival, joined the Society at various times. Both Russell and Yeats knew Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky personally, and both were deeply influenced by her. For seven years, Russell remained a member of the “Household,” a group of theosophists who lived together and formed the nucleus staff of The Irish Theosophist begun in 1892.2 This influential journal remained in publication until 1897 when it was replaced by The Internationalist, for which Eglinton wrote a great deal. Thereafter, the Irish theosophy movement, in parallel with the wider international organization, went through a number of breaks and schisms. Russell in particular, despite the upheavals, remained committed and active, especially in the later years as head of the Hermetic Society, until he left Ireland in 1933, just two years before his death.3 There were Dublin lodges and Dublin-based theosophical publications from the mid-1880s right through to the early 1930s, and Joyce knew this environment quite well. He read some of the theosophical literature as a student, including Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism and was distinctly unimpressed, according to C. P. Curran, although Stuart [End Page 281] Gilbert implied differently.4 Very much later, in 1931, he read and took a series of notes (in VI.B.33, pp. 45–48, 59, 60–63) from Arthur Edward Waite’s The Occult Sciences, which had a chapter on theosophy.5 There were also three pages of notes taken at VI.B.28, 17–22, from the same volume. Relatively few of these notes ended up in the Wake, but there was, in any case, an established fictional treatment of the subject in Ulysses, where theosophy is mocked as a cranky absurdity practiced by a trendy elite; and it receives considerably worse, and much-extended, treatment in the Wake.6 Early Wakeans identified a substantial number of Wake allusions to some of the key figures in theosophy—Annie Besant, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, Sinnett, and, especially Blavatsky—with Adaline Glasheen, in particular, showing how Joyce ridiculed the latter, in part through the repeated play on her maiden (or “mudhen”—FW 393.23) name.7 This was von Hahn (and “hahn” is German for “cock”—FW 66.23); thus any allusion to a “hen” is likely to implicate Blavatsky. Glasheen argues that the Wake letter picked over by the hen/Kate figure in I.5 likely represents Blavatsky’s works in that “the letter is a nothing, but to the idiot female it seems an important statement about the condition of man” (32). It should be added here that, in Blavatsky’s work, the egg, both “spiritual” and “mundane,” is of special significance—an emblem of eternity, infinitude, regeneration, and rejuvenation.8 This means that a complete explication of Blavatsky’s significance in the Wake would need to consider not just the hen/ Hahn connection but also the many references to eggs. Besides these biographical allusions to Blavatsky and company, James S. Atherton, like Clive Hart and, later, Roland McHugh, found a few allusions to Isis Unveiled—the two volumes were among Joyce’s personal book collection—but implied that the real significance of this massive work might run deeper.9 He suggested, rightly in my view, that much of the Wake material alluding...

Synge's Playboy and the Eugenics of Language

While much criticism of The Playboy of the Western World has focused on Christy's self-actualization through language, this essay asserts that Synge's imaginatively hybrid diction constitutes a critique of the discourses of heritage contemporaneous with the play's debut – biological and cultural, eugenic and evolutionary, as well as the projects of cultural and literary recuperation so central to the Irish Literary Revival. The drama's eugenic component reveals itself in the overarching objective of the main character, which is to kill his father and reinvigorate his lineage by marrying the beautiful and vital Pegeen Mike. The drama's cultural work is embedded in its linguistic negotiation between the colonizers' English and the land's native Gaelic. The inexorable force of unwanted heritage (biological, cultural, theatrical, linguistic) is subverted only through an imaginative act that both acknowledges and transforms the authority of the past.

Synge’s Playboy and the Eugenics of Language

While much criticism of The Playboy of the Western World has focused on Christy’s self-actualization through language, this essay asserts that Synge’s imaginatively hybrid diction constitutes a critique of the discourses of heritage contemporaneous with the play’s debut – biological and cultural, eugenic and evolutionary, as well as the projects of cultural and literary recuperation so central to the Irish Literary Revival. The drama’s eugenic component reveals itself in the overarching objective of the main character, which is to kill his father and reinvigorate his lineage by marrying the beautiful and vital Pegeen Mike. The drama’s cultural work is embedded in its linguistic negotiation between the colonizers’ English and the land’s native Gaelic. The inexorable force of unwanted heritage (biological, cultural, theatrical, linguistic) is subverted only through an imaginative act that both acknowledges and transforms the authority of the past.

James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism, and: Ulysses in Critical Perspective, and: Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings (review)

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism, and: Ulysses in Critical Perspective, and: Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings Katherine Mullin James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism. John Nash . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 220. $85.00 (cloth). Ulysses in Critical Perspective. Michael Patrick Gillespie and A. Nicholas Fargnoli , eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. x + 225. $59.95 (cloth). Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings. Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Geert Lernout, and John McCourt , eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Pp. xiv + 254. $59.95 (cloth). John Nash's James Joyce and the Act of Reception is a thoughtful, astute, and invaluable contribution to two affiliated and increasingly debated questions. For this book not only offers [End Page 403] a meticulous and persuasive account of Joyce's career-long engagement with his audiences—in Ireland and in Europe, in his lifetime and beyond—it, perhaps more importantly, also makes a significant contribution to ongoing critical conversations about modernism's relationship to various imagined audiences, its supposed resistance to the "common reader," and its often-cited dependence upon patrons and coteries. Nash begins by reminding us of Joyce's status as the central protagonist of a well-known modernist myth; that of the aloof, elite artist championed because of his supposed indifference to his audience. What follows provides a sustained interrogation of that myth, as the book reveals a writer not only absorbed by the difficult circumstances of his own reception, but also concerned to transform those circumstances into the material of his art. Finnegans Wake's numerous, often playful, invocations of its bored, baffled, perplexed, or "ideal insomniac" audience is revealed as the fruition of a sustained Joycean preoccupation with "writing . . . the act of reception" (3). Moving chronologically through the Joyce oeuvre, Nash begins with a lively account of Dubliners as a submerged assault upon the Irish Literary Revival's conception of an ideal, communal audience. While such an audience was in the process of being created through the Abbey Theatre by W. B. Yeats and others, Joyce, brooding in exile, offers a rival vision of "the specific audiences whom the Revival ignored or misjudged," bringing "a bored audience to life" (41). His analysis reaches its apotheosis in "The Dead," a story preoccupied with theatricality and blocked communications, and significantly composed while Joyce was simultaneously frustrated by his own failure to secure an Irish publisher, and by the Dublin riots over the first night of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. In Nash's compelling reading, "The Dead" and, in particular, Michael Furey's silenced haunting of its closing pages from Ireland's west, becomes, amongst other things, a resonant assault upon "the revivalist social and ideological form of a national audience" (60). For Joyce, Nash conclusively demonstrates, audiences are never so homogenous. Chapter 2 turns to one of Joyce's most famous "scenes of reception" (97), the "Scylla and Charybdis" library episode in Ulysses. Stephen's delivery of his Shakespeare theory to an alternately intrigued, exasperated, and even bored audience of Dublin literati passing the afternoon in its National Library is embedded in rich historical contexts. Nash shrewdly excavates the contemporary cultural politics of the National Library of Ireland and the affiliated Irish "university question" which preoccupied students and scholars at both Trinity and University Colleges. Those complex, fissured politics determine the splintered, uneasy reception of Stephen's Shakespeare theory by those gathered in the library to hear him. Stephen's declaration that he does not believe his own theory only underlines the instability of his audience. Chapters 3 and 4 are, perhaps, the most significant and ambitious chapters of this study, since they logically turn to Finnegans Wake, surely the most notoriously "difficult" of all modernist fictions. "We have become used to thinking of modernism as a collective movement distinguished in part by its expulsion of mass culture and so-called ordinary readers" (98), Nash reminds us, and Finnegans Wake is frequently seen as exemplary, and, less frequently, offered as a curiously democratic text, in that, since there is no model for competence, then there can be...

Acceptance of Hybridity and the Expansion of Identity: Focusing on Seamus Heaney and William Butler Yeats*

I insist in this paper that hybridity and identity are two aspects of modernity, not the separate words like in the aesthetic theory of 'discordia concors' and that modernity carries both in it, expanding relative values. A new version of culture will be able to come out, depending upon how to arrange hybridity and identity.The modern Irish culture, especially in its literature, offers a good example. As for the Irish people, the disaster of Great Famine brought an awakening that the Irish was not the British. And the Irish Literary Revival made the will to differentiate. However, even after the Irish Literary Revival, the Irish people found out that their own culture had been hybridized and that the cultural conflict existed. However, the Irish writers have tried to recreate their own culture based on the pride of their own culture-a firm religious, political and cultural tradition.W.B. Yeats's contribution lies in his attachment to things Irish. His spirit and taste for the supernatural world can be identified with Irishness. However, for Yeats the expression of identity cannot but be limited because he himself was hybrid in blood. Meanwhile, for Heaney, the expression of his own identity is seen in his concern about landscape, history and Gaelic language. His will to search for identity starts from the sense of dispossession, experiencing the Ulster Trouble. However he comes to recognize that they are hybridized. Despite this, his studious will to recreate identity has continued by accepting the hybridity.In brief, Yeats and Heaney are the poets who, moving beyond hybridity, wanted to make the new cultural identity or to complete 'discordia concors' in culture. My last conclusion is that Yeats and Heaney seek to expand the cultural identity by accepting the hybridity and heterogeneity of their culture, and that, however, their last convergence is to search for the essence of the Irish spirit- light, freedom and song.

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

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

The Victorian Fathers Of The Irish Literary Revival

This essay won the Inaugural British Association of Irish Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize. Lucie received her prize of £500 of Cambridge University Press books at the Irish Embassy on 4 May 2005.

“Gathering Thinglessness”: Beckett’s Drama, Scarcity, and the Irish Literary Revival

“Gathering Thinglessness”: Beckett’s Drama, Scarcity, and the Irish Literary Revival

UNNAMING THE SUBJECT: Samuel Beckett and Colonial Alterity

Since David Lloyd's pioneering studies some fifteen years ago, the postcolonial dimension of Beckett's work has received little sustained attention in critical scholarship. This essay contributes to a further evaluation of Beckett's engagement with postcoloniality by examining the ways in which Beckett's critique of the object emerges from a broader critique of postcolonial nationalism. Its discussion focuses particularly on "Recent Irish Poetry" and the "German Letter" as a means of illustrating the ways in which Beckett's impatience with the Irish Literary Revival and its insistence on nationalist representation coincides with the more far-reaching assault on language sketched for Kaun. Proceeding then to , the essay considers how the novel's relentless critique of subject and anti-subject draws much of its energy from Beckett's searching analysis of postcolonial representation.

BOOK REVIEW: James H. Murphy.IRELAND: A SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND LITERARY HISTORY, 1791-1891. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2003.

Reviewed by: Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891 Sara L. Maurer (bio) Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891, by James H. Murphy; pp. 224. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2003, €65.00, $65.00, €24.95 paper, $23.95 paper. Two hundred years after George IV allegedly announced that Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1801) had at last given him some real knowledge of his Irish subjects, those of us who consider our business the nineteenth-century British Isles still seem in want of a [End Page 466] reliable guide to Ireland. James H. Murphy writes to fill that need. He describes his book's purpose as twofold: on the one hand to elaborate the social context of nineteenth-century Irish literature in order to stimulate new currents of research in that field, and on the other "to report on current thinking and research on nineteenth-century Ireland from a variety of disciplines" (1). In the second endeavor, his book succeeds admirably, providing a brief but clear guide to the basic features of Irish life for those with little prior knowledge of it. Yet while Murphy presents the entire book as "based on a synthesis of current scholarship" (2), in his first stated purpose—stimulating research in nineteenth- century Irish literature—his book provides a more idiomatic view of Irish literature than he admits. This is not to say that Murphy's account of literature is not worthwhile, but rather to say that much like King George before us, we should be wary of taking any view as wholly representative when we educate ourselves on Ireland. At its best Murphy's overview reads like an animated conversation with a generous dissertation advisor, eager to point out an array of historical facts, cultural trends, and recent scholarship, as well as to suggest how these call for more in-depth investigation. Murphy offers a rapid-fire roundup of some of the most prominent features of the nineteenth-century Irish landscape; Ribbonmen, hedge schools, Daniel O'Connell's monster meetings, famine depopulation, religious factionalism, Fenians, the Home Rule movement, Paddy stereotypes, and the Gaelic Athletic Association are all concisely introduced and explained. Where scholarly opinion diverges, Murphy lists the competing theories, summarizing, for instance, schools of thought on the composition of the agrarian agitators known as Whiteboys, multiple explanations of why Tridentine Catholicism was so fervently embraced by the Irish, and debates about possible factors in the outbreak of the Land War. For scholars familiar with the British nineteenth century, but unschooled in Irish history, this book presents the basics in an easy day's read and provides a useful point of departure for further research. The volume concludes with a fifty-page bibliography of key scholarship on the Irish nineteenth century, grouped by topics such as "religion," "social life," and "land," as well as by individual literary authors. Most noteworthy about Murphy's work is the way its chronology avoids standard narratives that treat the Irish nineteenth century as either too British to count as Irish history at all, or else as one long prelude to Irish modernism and the Irish Free State. By starting his book with the first stirrings of rebellion that culminated in the 1798 uprising, Murphy crafts a historical vision of the century as begun on Irish initiative, rather than a century defined by the British imposition of the Act of Union in 1801. By ending before the Irish literary revival of the 1890s, Murphy is able to deal with the literary material in his book on terms other than whether it prefigures or fails to live up to Irish modernism. This is an Ireland that matters to a Victorian studies audience, an Ireland whose culture and history aren't simply idling in wait of their apotheosis in the twentieth century. Given this rather innovative organization, the most disappointing aspect of the book is its complete segregation of gender into the penultimate chapter, which provides a brief litany of how women's lives changed over the course of the century. Murphy knows this topic well (he coedited Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland with Margaret Kelleher [Dublin, Irish Academies Press...

Essentialist Agendas: The Irish Revival

Matthew Kelly discusses the concept of the Irish Revival as considered in four works: 'The Irish Revival Reappraised' by Betsy Taylor Fitzsimon & James H. Murphy; 'New Perspectives on the Irish Literary Revival' by Anne Fogarty; 'Revival. The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Co-Operative Movement' by P. J. Mathews; 'Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival' by Sinead Garrigan Mattar.

Ireland's "Proclaimed" Dramatist: Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell (1894-1976)

Dramatist, businessman, and senator, Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell (1894-1976) made noteworthy contributions, largely unrecognized today, to Irish arts, indus try and politics during the Irish Literary Revival and the following two decades.1 He is not to be confused with Frank Hugh O'Donnell (1846-1916), the Home Rule member of parliament, who penned the notorious pamphlet Souls for Gold attacking Yeats's Countess Cathleen in 1899.2 An exploration of O'Don nell's life and work reveals his formative impact on Irish amateur drama. His nationalistic play Dawn Mist (1919) earned the distinction of most proclaimed [banned] play, during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1921). In the fertile climate of the Irish Literary Revival, even a minor writer like O'Donnell could, and did, contribute to cultural nationalism and help to promote the cause of Irish independence. Furthermore, from 1926 through 1946, local ama teur dramatic competitions absorbed much of his energy. In a major two-part radio address, The Drama and Ourselves (1926), O'Donnell argued for the cre ation of a centralized, national amateur dramatic federation and competition. O'Donnell's legacy to Irish arts is well worth uncovering. He worked stren uously in the mid-i940S to promote Irish industrial design and to establish a Ministry of Arts and Crafts. It might be advanced that after the Treaty, he was, de facto, a minister of arts in the Irish Free State before such a post existed in the New Ireland. Horace Plunkett had been the first and only minister of arts in Ireland's provisional government during the Anglo-Irish War. post was abolished shortly after the creation of the Free State.3

The Other Irish Renaissance: The Maunsel Poets

A "renaissance" is a combination of the talent and the times. From Henry Howard to Houston Larmour Doak to Langston Hughes to Seamus Heaney, talent and time often have to be mixed with some good old-fashioned critical smoke and mirrors to create a renaissance. Though an English, Irish, Harlem, or Northern Irish Renaissance does not spring fully fledged and critically inviolable from some spirit of the age, there is much to be gained by reassessing the actual critical judgments that construct any renaissance. The very same reason why H. L. Doak is not immediately associated with the Irish Renaissance may likely be the reason that the others are. Like living anthologies, renaissances are made. To question their making is not simply a matter of recovering forgotten artists; in the best instances, it is a matter of re-creating the contentiousness of the times in which these authors wrote. While working with W. B. Yeats at Stone Cottage, Erza Pound looked back to the previous renaissances and reflected succinctly upon the construction of cultural movements that ". . . we have not realized to what extent a renaissance is a thing made—made by conscious propaganda."1 Irish writers have rarely been at a loss for recognizing the hostility and inertia also cited by Pound. Indeed, the Irish Literary Renaissance might be seen as the most intense generational reaction, among many options, against the inertia of the Irish parliamentary tradition and the hostility of British policy. The Irish Renaissance was strongly defined by the tendency to create propaganda—art driven by agenda. From Charles Read's Cabinet of Irish Literature (1884) and Justin McCarthy's Irish Literature (1904), which marked one beginning of the revival, through to the 2002 launch of the second Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, there has been a nearly constant search for, and critique of, the effort to establish a canonical group of Irish writings.2 Throughout the [End Page 54] past hundred and twenty-five years, schemes like the New Library of Ireland project in the 1890s emerge with regularity. At the outset, a simple reason behind the first anthologizing efforts was the attempt to resuscitate something that had never been.3 Intimately connected with that more practical drive was the desire of writers in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century to reach the growing reading public in Ireland and throughout the United Kingdom.4 Ironically, one of the most important venues for publishing during the Irish Literary Revival, the Maunsel Press, has been nearly written out of the narrative of the Irish Renaissance. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Maunsel's reputation throughout the United Kingdom stood in stark contrast to this fact. In 1916, the Glasgow Evening News highlighted the importance of Maunsel in light of its role in Ireland: The Irish literary movement, measured by the successes in book production, is becoming quite a formidable affair. Unfortunately, we do not fully appreciate its extent, because the majority of the volumes, running to many hundreds yearly, from the pens of Irishmen, are introduced by a London imprint on the title page. . . . At the present moment there is really only one firm—that of Maunsel & Co.—who set themselves out to keep the publishing tradition alive. From 1905 on, the Maunsel Press sought to reach Irish audiences throughout the United Kingdom through projects that included a wide array of publications: theater work; instructional texts; translations, such as the Modern Russian Library project; chapbooks, such as their Tower Press booklets; street ballads; and a journal of more established writers, The Shanachie (1906-7), edited by J. M. Hone. Maunsel's list clearly indicated that the press consciously set out to engage readers on a popular and national level. From 1905 to 1926, the Maunsel Press was rightly referred to as "a national institution." Publishing nearly six hundred original titles during those twenty-one [End Page 55] years, the press became a vital outlet for publishing...

“Too Much Knowledge of the Other World”: Women and Nineteenth-Century Irish Folktales

The IRISH literary revival of the 1880s and 90s, also known as the Irish Renaissance or Celtic Twilight, was largely inspired by an interest in folklore. While the best known Irish folklore collections remain those by key figures in this movement such as Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats, and Lady Augusta Gregory, the popular appetite for Irish folklore had in fact been strong throughout the nineteenth century. This essay examines Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland ( 1825), the first collection of Irish folktales, and Jeremiah Curtin's Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World: Collected from Oral Tradition in Southwest Munster (1895). Both collections draw their material from the same region and focus on tales of personal experience with the supernatural, rather than on heroic legends or wonder tales. Yet their representations of women, and particularly of female storytellers, contrast sharply. The differences in their methodology and style, as well as in the content of the tales, reflect not only the quirks of the individual collectors but also the dramatic social changes in rural Irish life after the Great Famine of 1845 to 49. Curtin 's tales illustrate a marked increase in conflict between the sexes, a phenomenon that historians such as Hasia Diner have attributed to the decline of marriage, the greater economic independence of women, and their tendency to emigrate alone or in all-female groups in the late nineteenth century. Whereas Croker treats female storytellers with an easygoing acceptance and respect, Curtin explicitly declares his bias against them; indeed, his dismissal of women's storytelling skills reinforces a prevailing motif in the tales he selects : that of women who are f orceably silenced. Moreover, the supernatural women in Curtin's collection fairy abductees or ghosts are remarkably vengeful and violent. Tracing the representation of female storytellers and of women's supernatural experiences in specific tales from each collection, I argue that Curtin's tales encode intense social anxieties about marriage and the radical shift in women's roles in nineteenth-century rural Ireland. Before examining each collection, however, I will briefly consider the role of women in Irish oral tradition, an issue Clodagh Brennan Harvey has described as anything but clear {Contemporary Irish 12). Harvey concedes that women most likely participated less in the storytelling than men, citing their preoccupation ... with their domestic responsibilities, which limitfed] their opportunities to hear and to learn new tales, and thus to participate more actively in the tradition (12). At the same time, she suggests that women's storytelling is simply less well documented. Because men and women usually went visiting

Ireland, India, and the Poetics of Internationalism

Focusing on decolonization and the home rule movement in India and Ireland, this article examines the career of the poet and theosophist James Cousins, who left a flourishing career in Dublin and settled in India in 1915. The substantial body of work published by Cousins in India represents his attempt to work through issues of realism and idealism in art that, in his view, remained unresolved in the Irish cultural renaissance. In his literary criticism he sought to find satisfactory models to deal with the pressing questions of decolonization and home rule. Privileging art over politics, Cousins regarded the Indian renaissance not as a moment of political awakening but rather as a movement toward aesthetic and philosophical unity, in stark contrast to the Irish literary revival, which was driven primarily by political goals. Drawing on such diverse thinkers as Tagore and Okakura, Cousins maintained that the struggle for freedom was essentially an expansion of critical consciousness. The real measure of civilizational strength for him was the accommodation of inner growth by external conditions. Where such conditions did not exist, only violence could result. Cousins pointed to the French Revolution as history's prime example of the reduction of the ideal to the assertion of local, narcissistic needs. The result of the friction between world idealism and political realism was the self-centered nationalism that Cousins abhorred as an aberration from the true course of human history. In his attempt to develop an aesthetics that could accommodate politics without being subordinated to it, however, Cousins drove his own work into oblivion, as other models of internationalism that were more overtly political and economic gained ascendancy.

Irish Tradition or Postdramatic Innovation? Storytelling in Contemporary Irish Plays

Storytelling in Irish drama has traditionally been perceived as evidence for a continuity between Irish theatre and a pre-modern, distinctly Irish oral culture. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of Postdramatic Theatre, however, allows one to describe the exhibition of the act of narration in contemporary Irish plays as a break with both Epic Theatre and the drama of the Irish Literary Revival. In contrast with the alienation effects of Epic Theatre, contemporary Irish theatre texts create intense relation-ships between narrator and story on the one hand and between narrator and audience on the other. Yet the acts of narration also differ from those in the drama of the Irish Literary Revival in that oral storytelling takes the form of intimate confessions and focusses not on collective but individual memory. At the same time, the Irish example casts a critical light on some of Lehmann’s concepts, particularly the avantgarde character of the so-called ‘post-epic’ narration and its inherent criticism of the mass media.

The Heritage of Elegy in The Crying Game (1993)

Irish literature has a long, elegiac history. In the past hundred years, political conflict, nationalism, and behaviors of mourning have became infused in Irish artistic representation, most notably through the cultural phenomenon now known as the Irish Literary Revival. Participants in the revival mixed poetry, politics, and social movements into their art. Specifically, the Irish sensibility produced a new sort of irony and ambivalence in artistic representation. Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game (1993) is indebted to this literary heritage. His film not only portrays the complicated nature of the politics, violence, and tragedy that surrounds the Troubles and Anglo-Irish relations, it also shows us that romanticizing violence, or using nostalgia to glorify the past, no longer communicates suffering sufficiently or accurately, and does not necessarily pro vide consolation. The Crying Game constitutes a modern elegy that transforms some of the traditional conventions of elegy to represent the complexity of nationalist issues.