Irish Revival Research Articles

Decolonisation and mysticism in William Butler Yeats's The Celtic Twilight and The Secret Rose

Yeats's responsibilities as one of Ireland's most prominent artists commenced with his aspiration to make Ireland a nation. His writings incorporate the three phases of development that Frantz Fanon posited for all new nations. Although Fanon described his three phases of decolonisation well after The Celtic Twilight and The Secret Rose were compiled, Fanon's framework elucidates Yeats's writings. Yeats's use of mystical elements embodies Fanon's idea of the colonial binary, the negritude binary, and transnational consciousness. Yeats discovered the answers to decolonisation in mysticism. His insights about folklore when coupled with imagination brought about many mystical revelations that linked Ireland to mysticism of global dimensions. Yeats's insights moved Ireland beyond binaries and solely nationalistic thinking to encourage Ireland to develop a transnational consciousness, transcending postcolonial binaries to achieve nationhood.

Representing the national landscape in Irish Romanticism

Ireland is a country which has come to be defined in part by an ideology which conflates nationalism with the land. From the Irish Revival's celebration of the Irish peasant farmer as the ideal Irishman to the fierce history of land claim battles between the Irish and their colonisers, notions of the land have become particularly bound up with conceptions of what Ireland is and what it is to be Irish. In this book, Wright considers this fraught relationship between land and national identity in Irish literature. In doing so, she presents a new vision of the Irish national landscape as one that is vitally connected to larger geographical spheres. By exploring issues of globalisation, international radicalism, trade routes, and the export of natural resources, Wright is at the cutting edge of modern global scholarly trends and concerns. In considering texts from the Romantic era such as Leslie's Killarney, Edgeworth's Limerick Gloves, and Moore's Irish Melodies, Wright undercuts the nationalist myth of a people of the soil using the very texts which helped to construct this myth. Reigniting the field of Irish Romanticism, Wright presents original readings which call into question politically motivated mythologies while energising nationalist conceptions that reflect transnational networks and mobility.

Introduction Irish Aestheticism

Introduction Irish Aestheticism Joseph Bristow (bio) The topic of Irish aestheticism is by no means as familiar in literary history as that of the Irish revival, the movement whose origins scholars frequently trace to Standish O’Grady, whose Early Bardic Literature of Ireland (1879) stands among the first of his long line of publications on Irish legend. O’Grady’s subsequent romances about ancient Ireland followed in the style of eighteenth-century Scottish scholar James Macpherson’s eloquent prose adaptations of the oral poetry from the Highlands and Hebrides that preserved the gallant stories of warrior Fingal, his blind poet son Ossian, and his valiant grandchild Oscar. O’Grady’s cousin, Standish Hayes O’Grady, was a founding member of the Ossianic Society of Dublin (1853–63), which took its name from Macpherson’s popular Works of Ossian (1765). After Charlotte Brooke published her fine anthology Reliques of Irish Poetry, Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies, and Songs, Translated into English Verse (1789), the Ossianic Society was the first group to dedicate influential amounts of research to recovering the rich heritage of Irish poetry, folklore, and tradition, especially the Irish versions of the Celtic histories that Macpherson had unearthed in their Caledonian forms. This reclamation of ancient Irish culture and its impact on the revival and its nationalist aims is familiar to students of modernism. The revival had its origins in the ethnographic turn that E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture precipitated in 1871, and its main progenitors included Charles Gavan Duffy, George Sigerson, and Douglas Hyde. As Gregory Castle has observed, these intellectuals—who “disseminated an ideology of ‘racial’ self-improvement and national education” aiming to “restore a belief in the essential [End Page 781] piety and nobility of the Irish people”—provided the framework for much of W. B. Yeats’s poetry from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) onward, Augusta Gregory’s collections of Irish myths, John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands (1898), and some of the early productions at the Abbey Theatre.1 Yet critics of Yeats also know well that his involvement with the Rhymers’ Club in London during the fin de siácle also brought him into contact with several poets whose works are associated with aestheticism and decadence. The attendees at the club, which met at the Cheshire Cheese public house, Fleet Street, included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Symons, whose work appeared in the famous Book of the Rhymers Club (1892) and the Second Book of the Rhymers Club (1892). Another of the writers on the edges of this circle was Oscar Wilde: the increasingly respected writer who had earlier enjoyed much celebrity—if not a large measure of notoriety—as a self-appointed “professor of aesthetics” who began to make his stylish presence and memorable pronouncements on art at several fashionable gatherings in the late 1870s. No other figure besides Wilde could stake a stronger claim as a champion of l’art pour l’art during this period. He was the quintessential aesthete of his time. Wilde was also, though there should be little need to note this fact, an Irishman. More to the point, he was raised in a household that in principle gave him everything he needed to become (had he wished) a figurehead in the revival. His mother, Jane Francesca Elgee—who established her career with polemical nationalist poems issued during the late 1840s under the name “Speranza”—expressed great pride in taking her youngest son’s given names from Macpherson’s Ossian; as she told a friend in a letter: “He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde. Is not that grand, misty, and Ossianic?”2 In 1857 Wilde’s father—the prominent ear surgeon and archeologist Sir William Wilde—participated in the British Association and Royal Irish Academy’s ethnological excursion to the Aran Islands. He was also a member of the Ossianic Society. Besides his scientific papers, Sir William’s numerous publications included A Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities of Stone, Earthen, and Vegetable Materials in the Royal Irish Academy (1857). Many years after her spouse had died, Lady Wilde published Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887). This...

L’horizon dans Foley (2000) de Michael West : vers une poétique de la redite

This article examines how Michael West’s 2000 play Foley explores not only the eponymous character’s wandering identity but also the vagaries and traps of storytelling. Foley tramps the Irish landscape and his own mindscape. In this, he is reminiscent of the tramps, tinkers, and strangers staged by the Irish Revival in the early 20th century and of many of Samuel Beckett’s characters. West’s Foley also exposes the layers of memory composing his conflicting identity and plays with metatheatricality by exposing the artificial horizon of his own story.

Dress and National Identity: Women’s Clothing and the Celtic Revival

This paper will focus on an interesting diversion in the history of dress in Ireland: the story of clothing and the Irish cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will endeavour to address the ideology of so-called Irish costume, and how it was intended to be a visual symbol of an Irish renaissance, one which would help in the effort to counter British influences and establish a strong cultural identity. Although Celtic Revival clothing was worn by both men and women as a signifier of cultural and political sympathies, this paper will look specifically at women’s dress and attempts to promote Irish costume as a tool for nation building, and as a practical solution to the wearing of imported fashions. It will highlight just some examples of where, when and by whom Celtic Revival dress was worn.

Circulating agency

The creation of bespoke collections of plaster casts of ‘Celtic’ sculpture for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition and museums in Dundee in 1904/11 and Aberdeen in 1905 provides a Scottish lens on a wider phenomenon and its context: South Kensington’s role in the provinces, museums and ‘imperial localism’, burgeoning curatorial professionalism and networking, milestones in early medieval scholarship, objects as ‘archaeology’ or ‘art’, the value of replicas, and the Celtic Revival. A ‘provinces-up’ approach explores practices on the ground to reveal the significance of the work of the V&A’s Circulation Department and of people such as R. F. Martin, that institutional histories omit. Exposing how the Dundee and Aberdeen art exhibitions were selectively derivative of Glasgow’s antiquarian enterprise, and the vagaries of their subsequent survival, illuminates the importance of understanding what past and present collections omit and why, as well as what they include.

The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal edited by Susan Schreibman (review)

Reviewed by: The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisaledited by Susan Schreibman Lee M. Jenkins The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal. Ed. Susan Schreibman. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. The author of a single slim volume, Poems(1934), Thomas MacGreevy (1893–1967) is better known as the friend of poets than as a poet in his own right. Readers of the Wallace Stevens Journalwill be familiar with MacGreevy from the correspondence he initiated with Stevens in 1948, and from the poem prompted by that correspondence, “Our stars Come from Ireland”: the young Tom M[a]cGreevy appears in the poem’s first part, imaginatively relocated from his birthplace in Tarbert, County Kerry to Stevens’ native Pennsylvania. “Our stars Come from Ireland,” which ghosts lines from MacGreevy’s poem “Homage to Hieronymus Bosch,” is Stevens’ homage to the man he would call (in an unpublished letter) “the best of all my correspondents,” and to the haunting and fractured lyricism of MacGreevy’s own verse. MacGreevy’s oeuvre, modest as it was, instantiated an Irish mode of poetic modernism that one of its practitioners, Samuel Beckett, defined in contradistinction to the lingering Celtic Twilight antiquarianism of Irish poetry after Yeats. The publication in 1994 of Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis’ important Modernism and Irelanddid much to redress what has been the longstanding scholarly neglect of this Other Tradition in Irish poetry. Susan Schreibman, who contributed to the Coughlan and Davis collection, has for more than two decades acted as the keeper of MacGreevy’s particular flame. The creator of the digital Thomas MacGreevy Archiveand the editor of an annotated Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy(1991), Schreibman is presently writing MacGreevy’s biography. Her aim, as the editor of The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal, is to recuperate MacGreevy from “the margins of modernist literary and art history” (xxv). [End Page 107] Notwithstanding a number of excellent individual chapters, however, the collection as a whole is uneven in its critical quality and in its coverage. The remit of the Bloomsbury Historicizing Modernismseries in which The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevyappears may be responsible for the book’s major flaw, the disproportionate attention to the life at the expense of the work. Of the chapters that do engage with the work, or which imbricate the life with the work in generative ways, too many concern MacGreevy’s art criticism, too few his poetry and his literary criticism. Only three chapters out of twenty-one are exclusively devoted to MacGreevy’s verse, and curiously, given that MacGreevy was by no means a prolific poet, the lion’s share of critical attention is restricted to just a handful of the poems: “De Civitate Hominum,” “Homage to Hieronymus Bosch,” and “Aodh ruadh Ó Domhnaill.” Although several of the contributors allude to the decades of MacGreevy’s post- Poemssilence, only Michael Smith, in the short piece with which the book concludes, mentions the late lyrical resurgence of “Moments Musicaux” and “Breton Oracles,” a diptych published in Poetrymagazine in 1961. MacGreevy’s achievement as a poet (and translator) thus appears more attenuated than was actually the case, a state of affairs exacerbated by the fact that neither Schreibman’s Collected Poemsnor Thomas Dillon Redshaw’s earlier New Writers’ Press edition of his poetry is presently in print (the poems are not part of the online MacGreevy Archive). MacGreevy’s reputation at home has nonetheless risen in recent years, due to Ireland’s belated reconciliation with the nearly 200,000 Irishmen, MacGreevy among them, who enlisted in the British armed forces during World War One. Although he was an Irish nationalist and an out-and-out Anglophobe, MacGreevy joined up in 1916. Serving with the Field Artillery, he was wounded at Ypres salient, and again at the Somme. Gerald Dawe’s landmark anthology of Irish First and Second World War poetry, Earth Voices Whispering(2008), takes its title from MacGreevy’s “Nocturne”: I labour in a barren place, Alone, self-conscious, frightened, blundering; Far away, stars wheeling in space, About my feet, earth voices whispering. (MacGreevy, Collected Poems1) Compact and cosmic...

Winifred M. Patton and the Irish Revival in London

The place of London in the Irish Revival is sometimes overlooked, yet, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the city served as a place where Irish political and cultural identities were reinvigorated amongst the migrant community there and fed directly into events back home. The experience of living in London, at one remove from Ireland, appears to have reinforced a sense of belonging and nationhood for many writers, the most prominent of which was Yeats. This article examines the life and work of Winifred M. Patton, a gifted Irish writer and nationalist who lived there between 1893 and 1914. Whilst she never achieved the same reputation as some of her contemporaries, Patton, nevertheless, published widely in Irish nationalist newspapers of the time. Apart from writing poetry, short stories and essays, she was also active in political and cultural organisations such as the Gaelic League and the Irish Fireside Club helping ferment Irish nationalist aspirations at a crucial turning point in British–Irish relations. Based on new research into an archival collection of Patton's papers, this article examines the relationship between migration, gender and nationalism and the role of literature in mediations of cultural identity in the Irish diaspora.

A Celtic Twilight in Little England: G.K. Chesterton and W.B. Yeats

G.K. Chesterton's 1936 Autobiography affectionately re-creates his first meetings with W.B. Yeats, whose critical thought Chesterton parsed in his 1905 book Heretics. Chesterton was dubious about Yeats's occultism, but attracted by the Irish Revival's linking of cultural reawakening with small-scale economic independence. His criticism of Yeats's linking of nationalism and mysticism anticipates Benedict Anderson's seminal theorising of nationalism. P.J. Mathews's Revival locates texts in the context of separatist agitation against Joseph Chamberlain's Boer War. Chesterton's 1904 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill can be read as a parallel text, explicitly rebutting Chamberlain's imperialist philosophy, but also repurposing elements of Yeats's critique of Matthew Arnold's Celt/Teuton cultural binaries for application to English classes. Declan Kiberd's idea that Wilde exposed England as deeply colonised by the British Empire usefully situates Notting Hill's anti-imperialism. Chesterton grants the English populace the Hellenistic spontaneity of consciousness Arnold denied them, and sets forth a vision of English nationalism that even contains a critique of Anderson's “official nationalism”. Notting Hill's politico-cultural revolution, led by Wayne, a poet-warrior, and Turnbull, a visionary shop-keeper, defeats the forces of imperialist politics, plutocratic economics, and empiricist philistinism, and acts as an English parallel in its concerns to Yeats's decolonising process.

The warrior and the wife: imagining the Irish homeland in the illustrations of John Campbell

Between 1904 and 1912 Belfast artist John Campbell produced some of the most remarkable political illustrations of the Irish Revival which are largely unstudied in spite of their notable quality and appearance in some of the foremost periodicals of the day. This article examines several of Campbell's most interesting nationalist works and discusses his depictions of warriors that defend the homeland and wives who nurture Irish culture and tradition. These gendered, folkloric characters aid Campbell in constructing an Ireland he sees as capable of nationhood: one with strong ties to history, whose culture is celebrated, and that inspires strong allegiances amongst its people. Through his illustrations, Campbell makes visual the thematic paradigms of the Irish Revival and demonstrates the importance of the arts in fighting the political battles of the age.

‘That ancient self’

This essay argues that the twentieth-century movement of literary and cultural revival known as the Scottish Renaissance was, like the Irish Revival lead by W.B. Yeats, a counter-Renaissance against the anti-national ideals of the Renaissance; it was also, somewhat paradoxically, a lament and a replacement for the Renaissance that Scotland supposedly did not have in the early modern period. While two of the main protagonists of the modern Renaissance, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, disagreed fundamentally over the future direction of Scottish letters, they both agreed that the Golden Age of Scottish literature occurred in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century period of Robert Henryson and William Dunbar. They, and others of the modern Renaissance, also agreed that the Reformation was a disaster for Scottish creativity. This historical pessimism of the Scottish Renaissance is related to its Modernist context.

Forging a New Nation: A Study of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The paper tries to contextualize the modernist text, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce in the trajectory of nationalism and attempts to posit it as a cultural text that foregrounds the forging of the ‘uncreated’. The paper shows how Joyce becomes critical of the nationalization of the past that the Celtic Revival aimed at. The protagonist, Stephen tries to participate in the burgeoning national culture by forging new paths to future. Joyce also criticizes the ethnocentric, xenophobic and monolithic aspects of Irish nationalism which was hostile to the pluralistic, heterogeneous and multivalent perspectives. Along with nationalism, Joyce also criticizes the modern construct of the nation state. Based on the link between nation and imagination, Joyce provides a new possibility of imagining a nation that celebrates the multiple voices by accommodating the marginalized and silenced voices, quite outside the grids of the nation state. The text shows how through the recreation of primordial and perennial cultural and ethnic propensity of Ireland, such a nation can be forged, and thus the reality of experience can be encountered.

The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form by Stuti Khanna

Reviewed by: The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form by Stuti Khanna David Spurr (bio) The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form, by Stuti Khanna. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. viii + 229 pp. $95.00. The title of this monograph is slightly misleading, as it consists primarily of a comparative study of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. The comparison is instructive, however, insofar as the works of these two writers represent fictional interpretations of the city in its modern and postmodern forms, respectively. According to Stuti Khanna, “[m]odernist” cities like “Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and London” were the cosmopolitan “metropolises” at the beginning of the twentieth century that favored the development of modernist art (3). Dublin figures among them at least marginally, because of the modern elements of its infrastructure and the presence of the Irish Revival. “Postmodern” cities include those beyond Europe and North America, like Bombay, Shanghai, and São Paulo, which are marked by the effects of late capitalism, globalization, migration, and postmodern culture (3). Khanna’s contention is that the radical literary forms adopted by Joyce and Rushdie are the direct effects of urban experience in the cities about which they write. Her study also has the implicit purpose of evaluating both writers according to the degree in which they accurately represent the “multiple, many-layered” aspects of the city, its variety of classes and ethnicities, its “crowded realities,” and its status as a place for “the articulation of untotalizable differences that open up new ways of thinking and being” (69, 144, 66). With respect to Joyce, this argument is hardly new, but in support of it Khanna offers some interesting readings of certain episodes in Ulysses. What takes places in “Cyclops,” for example, is not the simple confrontation of tolerance and intolerance or of reason and passion conventionally seen there. If we take into account everything [End Page 535] said by all those present in Barney Kiernan’s pub, there is, in fact, a spirited debate about the categories of nation and race that is more than two-sided. Not everything the Citizen says is unreasonable, such as his environmentalist plea against deforestation: “Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O” (U 12.1263–64). The episode explores a variety of ways of being Irish, making it difficult to reach definite conclusions about the nature of Irish nationalism. As a further example of the “heterogeneities and contradictions” found in a “postcolonial metropolis” (83), Khanna points to ways in which the official status of such civic institutions as the museum and public library is transformed in Joyce’s narrative. Bloom’s curiosity concerning the nether parts of the Venus Callipyge at the National Museum is offered as an alternate but legitimate form of aesthetic appreciation resulting from Joyce’s refusal to “hierarchize different kinds of knowledges” (108). In the library, the traditional “injunction to silence” is “flouted with impunity as even the librarians [themselves] participate with gusto” in the literary discussion (110). Since this is presented as an example of lively disregard for institutional decorum, it should perhaps be pointed out that the discussion in question takes place in Thomas Lyster’s office, sealed by closed doors from the reading room and adjacent hallway. Khanna’s most interesting chapter explores the way both Joyce and Rushdie put forward figures of the artist as a means of exploring the city. This is a key question insofar as both modernism and postmodernism are commonly held to be artistic movements for which the urban environment has been essential both as a space of collaboration and as a source of new material for artists. In these two writers, however, the figure of the artist is far from being a triumphant product of the city. Khanna points out that, for Stephen Dedalus, the city is not “confronted head on but sublimated and epiphanized into timeless essences” (125). Stephen, in other words, will not serve as a reliable interpreter of the city. That task falls, rather, on Leopold Bloom, whose “mind works by association, opening up unending series of observations” and reflections on...

Temporality and Irish Revivalism: Past, Present, and Becoming

This article examines how the progress of the Irish language revival has been infused with considerations of temporality, particularly as manifested in literature and in the discourse surrounding native tradition. The discussion draws on Gilles Deleuze's reinterpretation of the work of Henri Bergson on time and memory, and of the Nietzschean notion of the 'eternal return.'

The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 by Joseph Valente (review)

Valente, Joseph. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. $50.00 hc. 289 pp.In the past decade or so, a wealth of smart scholarship focused on Irish Revivalism has appeared, fruitfully highlighting the rich complexity and inherent contradictions characterizing this instance of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cultural nationalism. With his study The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922, Joseph Valente usefully focuses that conversation on manliness, a category long defined by scholars as either essentially ontological or ethical, but one Valente sees instead as fundamentally ideological (2). This recalibration is an important one. It allows him to trace the of Irish manhood, which traps its subjects in a discordia concours in which manliness paradoxically represented both the consummation of the masculine condition, its perfection if you will, and a sublation of the masculine condition into a loftier form (2). In his introduction, Valente contextualizes this harmonious discord, revealing how it was constructed in part by English Victorian intellectuals including Carlyle, Arnold, Tennyson, and Kingsley, men who simultaneously and successfully represented the Irish as enslaved by their passions. To advance a variety of nationalist agendas the Irish deployed both the animalistic and the self-regulatory aspects of the seemingly contradictory colonial ethos of manhood. The Irish manipulation of this insoluble double bind (10) of manliness provides the engine driving Valente's trenchant analysis. Prior to independence, he asks, how did the Irish internalize and reappropriate this imperial ethos of manhood (and its powerful social currency) for their own political and cultural ends?Appropriately, Valente opens his study with two chapters examining the nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who (thanks in part to Joyce) has long served as the vexed poster boy for Irish manliness during the Victorian era. In his study of Parnell, Valente provocatively suggests that we release the term performance from volition and read Parnell's place in culture as part of a structural category- one that enabled him to participate effectively in the bind of animal passion and self-control until the exposure of his affair with Katharine (Kitty) O'Shea reduced him to an effeminate and ineffectual dandy in the eyes of the world. This latter point is supplemented by a range of previously unpublished political cartoons that persuasively demonstrate the corrosive effects of the Parnell debate on representations of Irish masculinity.Parnell's traumatic fall not only reveals the limits of the Irish invocation of the myth of manliness, but also paves the way for a powerful reading of the work of Lady Gregory. Her play The Deliverer (1911), as Valente notes, has traditionally been read as an allegory of Parnell's fall. He sees in this play the emancipatory justification (87) of a dignity defined by the ability to bear loss and suffer defeat, which Gregory offered as one means of taming the unruly and threatening aspects of Fenianism. His astute readings of Gregory's writing, a critical attention much merited and long overdue, segue into a third chapter attending to Revivalist dramas that deploy the Sovereignty myth. In these dramas, the Sovereign Hag seduces a young man and is transformed into a young woman, a logic made famous by Yeats and Gregory's play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902). Gregory is not the only sorely overlooked dramatist to whom Valente awards attention: he also offers in this chapter nuanced readings of plays by Patrick Pearse, Lennox Robinson, and James Stephens, as well as shedding new light on classics like Synge's The Shadow of the Glen (1903), which he reads as a spoof of the Sovereignty myth dominating the stage of this period.Tales of the Irish hero Cuchulain were, like the Sovereignty myth, employed by Revivalists to promote native masculinity in the midst of imperialism. …

The Conservative Party and Welsh Politics in the Inter-War Years

Abstract Following the 1931 general election, the Conservative party dominated the electoral landscape in England and reached a twentieth-century high in Scotland. Conservatives in Wales, by contrast, failed to ride the wave of ‘National’ politics in the 1930s, with their best performances at the ballot box confined to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The following article explores the reasons for Conservative failure in Wales and explains the pattern with reference to two types of constituency, namely the industrial seats of South Wales and the rural seats of Welsh-speaking West Wales, both of which were crucial to any party hoping to advance in the principality. The article highlights the essential durability of pre-1914 political cultures, along with the Conservatives’ failure both to neutralise the anti-English flavour of the Victorian Celtic revival and, unlike Labour in South Wales, to capitalise on the mutable nature of the dissenting tradition. The obstacles to Conservative success were further shaped by social and economic conditions, linguistic peculiarities and denominational identities, compounded by the ability of the Liberal party in West Wales, and increasingly the Labour party in South Wales, to (re)construct imagined ‘national’ political identities that served as counter-hegemonic discourses against British Conservatism. Amid the recent transnational turn, this article alerts us to the continuing scope of the national idiom in discussions of modern British political culture.

“Riders to the Sea”/“La Cavalcata al Mare” by John Millington Synge (review)

Reviewed by: “Riders to the Sea”/“La Cavalcata al Mare” by John Millington Synge Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (bio) “RIDERS TO THE SEA”/“LA CAVALCATA AL MARE,” by John Millington Synge, translated by James Joyce and Nicolò Vidacovich, edited by Dario Calimani. Treviso: Compiano Editore, 2012. 126 pp. €16.00. This elegant volume, edited by Dario Calimani, is the latest Italian edition of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, translated into Italian by James Joyce and Nicolò Vidacovich, one of Joyce’s Triestine pupils and a well-known lawyer. Previous publications, after the first appearance of the Italian translation in Solaria,1 include the 1988 edition by E. Fintz Menasce,2 which is listed in Calimani’s bibliography, and the prestigious 1992 Mondadori publication in Poesie e Prose, edited by Franca Ruggieri.3 What makes this 2012 edition particularly interesting is its layout: we not only have Synge’s play on the left-hand page and the Joyce-Vidacovich translation on the right, but also everything in this volume is bilingual. The thirty-six-page Italian introduction by Calimani is accompanied by an excellent English translation, as are the notes and the bibliography. Such an editorial choice certainly increases the potential readership of the book because it is clearly addressed to both Italian- and English-speaking audiences.4 This edition, moreover, is part of an ambitious editorial project that will be completed in the near future. The editor, Calimani, is the chair of English literature at the University of Venice, and he told me that his love for Synge’s play goes back many years (7 June 2013). He shows this affection in his introduction, where he writes: “Riders to the Sea is an artistic jewel that links indissolubly the names of Synge and Joyce as the symbol of a profound affinity of both intellect and sentiments” (60). About fifteen years ago, one of Calimani’s students, a retired surgeon who attended a course on the Irish theater, suggested that a luxury edition of the play, including the Joyce-Vidacovich translation, should be published. The idea was that Calimani would write an introduction and possibly some notes. The surgeon convinced an artist from Genoa, Emanuele Luzzati (1921-2007), to draw a series of serigraphs to illustrate Synge’s play, and he also sponsored the silk printing of a hundred numbered copies.5 The original project was to consist of the publication of a two-book slipcase containing a hardback, illustrated, and luxury volume with Luzzati’s serigraphs and a paperback copy. The idea was to appeal to serious scholars as well as to students and general readers. Unfortunately, the James Joyce estate objected to the publication, and the project was frozen until the copyright expired in 2011. In the meantime, however, the publisher Treviso also lost interest in the project, and it was only recently that Calimani was able to have just the paperback volume printed. I note that the book cover features a beautiful reproduction [End Page 1114] of one of Luzzati’s serigraphs representing a ship in a storm and the figure of a woman wrapped in a robe waiting on shore—a powerful image evoking tragedy. Synge scholars will definitely appreciate this publication, enriched as it is by the Joyce-Vidacovich translation. They will find Calimani’s introduction extremely provocative and effectively argued in its scrutiny of the Synge-William Butler Yeats relationship, re-creation of the cultural background of the Celtic Revival, and evaluation of “this miniature masterpiece of Irish literature,” which was set to music by the English composer Ralph Vaughan William and “is still considered [his] most successful opera” (37, 38).6 Calimani describes at length Yeats’s interest in Synge, their meeting, and the advice Yeats gave him: “Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression” (39).7 It was thanks to Yeats’s suggestion that Riders to the Sea was created. Surprisingly enough, Calimani observes, for Yeats, “the play seemed, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek tragedy, too passive in suffering” (45). According to Calimani, “Yeats did not like...

Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and IrelandSamuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Thomas M. Curley. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. x+338.

<i>Thomas M. Curley</i>, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland<i>Samuel Johnson, the <i>Ossian</i> Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland</i>. Thomas M. Curley. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. x+338.

Two dramatic treatments of the ‘Déirdre’ legend: a case study in Irish betrayal

During the heightened cultural activity of the Celtic Revival, the moral ownership and utilisation of Ireland's literary remains became an important cultural issue. At the same time, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish writers were concerned to ‘retell’ ancient stories in ways which explored their relevance to the modern world. One of the most retold tales from the period was the story of Déirdre and the Sons of Usnach. The story of Déirdre broaches one of the most ubiquitous of human experiences – betrayal – and it does so in relation to both political and interpersonal behaviour. This essay examines two dramatic treatments from the early years of the century: W.B. Yeats's one-act Deirdre (1907) and J.M. Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows, unfinished at the time of his death and finally published in 1910. This essay looks to account for the particular ways in which each author inflects the legend in terms of their own concerns, and in particular how both Yeats and Synge engaged with a discourse of betrayal that – although always significant in Irish cultural history – was moving to a position of centrality in Irish national life in the years leading up to the revolutionary period.

The Irish fairy tale: a narrative tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Narrativity, between Orality and Writing 2.The Fairy tale: Reformulation of a Concept Notes Chapter 1. A Celtic Legacy and Christian Syncretism 1. A Methodological Introduction 2. The Celtic Heredity 3. The Christian Appropriation of Celtic Tradition Notes Chapter 2. The Precursors of Yeats in the Recuperation of the Narrative Tradition 1. The Royal Hibernian Tales 2. Thomas Crofton Croker and His Followers 3. Patrick Kennedy 4. Letitia McClintock, Lady Wilde, Douglas Hyde 5. The Literary Reception of the Written Gaelic Tradition Notes Chapter 3. A Rebirth in the Light of the Tradition 1. The National Question and Literary Rebirth 2. Yeats, the Inspiration of the Irish Revival 3. The Distinguishing Characteristics of Yeats' Collections 4. The Fairy Tale according to Stephens Notes, Chapter 4. The Fairy Tale between fabula and historia 1. The Space-Time Coordinates of the Fairy Tale 2. The Dynamic Established by the Fairy Tale Notes Chapter 5. The Process of Composition of the Fairy Tale 1. The Triangle Composed of Etain, Midir and Eochaid and the Origin of the Fairy Tale 2. An Analysis of the Priomscel and the Structure of the Fairy Tale 3. Classification of the Functions and Characterization of the Fairy Tale Notes Chapter 6. Plurality and Metanarrative in the Fairy Tale 1. Substructure and Metastructure 2. Deep Structure and Surface Structure 3. The Narrativity Produced by the Fairy Tale Notes Chapter 7. The Significance of the Fairy Tale in the Historical and Cultural Context 1. An Indicative Metaphor 2. The Epiphanic and Pragmatic Components of the Fairy Tale 3. The Dialectic between Signifier and Signified Notes Chapter 8. Between the Fairy Tale and Tale 1. The Five Phases of the Fairy Tale 2. The Fairy Tale and the Pseudo-Fairy Tale 3. The Joycian Tale in the Light of the Fairy Tale Notes Chapter 9. Narrative Construction and Re-Construction of the World 1. Paradigm and Syntagma, Fabula and Plot 2. An Essential Dialectic Notes Chapter 10. Beyond Ireland: a General Perspective 1. Narrativity as a Quest for Meaning 2. A Model of Universal Significance Notes Select Bibliography