Irish Revival Research Articles

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull's Other Island

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull's Other Island Kathleen Ochshorn Seen from a twenty-first-century perspective, Bernard Shaw's 1904 play John Bull's Other Island is remarkably resonant. The Englishman Broadbent and the Irishman Larry Doyle, partners in a Westminster civil engineering firm, travel to rural Rosscullen and come up with a land development scheme. Broadbent's plans are grand in scale: "We'll take Ireland in hand. . . . I shall found public institutions: a library, a polytechnic (undenominational, of course), a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. . . . The round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored." 1 Local characters will be tourist attractions. He envisions a Disney-like Ireland, an Irish Epcot. The hilarious battle between the forces of modernization and tradition depicted in Shaw's play is being enacted rather seriously in contemporary Ireland, particularly in the republic. In 2004, a hundred years after John Bull's Other Island was written, six and a half million tourists visited Ireland; it was listed as the number one golf destination in the world. 2 A cultural battle erupted in 2005 over the government breaking ground for a highway near the historic site of Tara, the seat of the high kings. As several Irish scholars wrote in a letter to the Sunday Independent, "Ireland's premier landscape, an icon of our nationhood, is about to suffer an act of vandalism that will see a four lane motorway, a large intersection and undoubted secondary developments obliterate its landscape. All in the name of progress." 3 Colm Toibin noted in the New York Times op-ed section that "[a] place of myth and mystery will look like anywhere. It is called modernization." 4 John Bull's Other Island is a play full of irony, with stereotypes established and undermined, most points of view ridiculed, and little hope offered of a realistic solution to the puzzles of poverty and development. Shaw seems to be the puppet master, hanging over the stage, getting a dark laugh from his absurdist piece. The very occasion for the play, William Butler Yeats's [End Page 180] invitation to Shaw to write a piece for the Irish Literary Theatre, may be the underlying source of much of the irony. As Shaw famously wrote in his 1906 "Preface for Politicians," his play "was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentiment of the real old Ireland" (443). From the outset, this play was built on these contradictory impulses. Asked to commemorate the Irish Revival, which he abhorred, Shaw ended up satirizing the Irish and the English. Tracy C. Davis has contended that Shaw's plays are "a prolonged meditation on the dilemma of colonization, never achieving postcolonialism because institutions of power are not dismantled. . . ." 5 But in John Bull's Other Island, Shaw manages to define and ridicule colonialism; anticipate the nature of a postcolonial Ireland; and imply the difficulties of a free trade, neocolonial economy, where individual and national interests are subverted by the all-powerful forces of development and transnational commerce. Shaw satirizes a particular vision of economic development, largely presented by Broadbent, who also plans to stand for Parliament. The critique prefigures the writings of other colonial and postcolonial writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, whose scathing book A Small Place presents a similar view of a postcolonial economy based on tourism in another former British colony, her native Antigua. 6 Just as Kincaid describes a Hotel Training School built to provide labor for the tourist industry, Broadbent envisions a nondenominational polytechnic to teach efficient development and sort out the best ways to make money. Keegan observes of Broadbent that "[h]e is efficient in the service of Mammon, mighty in mischief, skillful in ruin, heroic in destruction" (606–07). Shaw...

SEVERING CONNECTIONS WITH IRELAND: Women and the Irish Free State in Beckett's Writing

Beckett's female characterization in his early fiction is grotesque, devouring and sexually provocative. The intention of this article is to examine how such characterization is closely related to Beckett's resistance to the Irish Free State and the Celtic Revival movement by showing that the characterization can be attributed to the impulse to satirize the Celtic revivalists' portrayal of the idealized woman-as-Ireland. This article will argue that the male protagonists' attempt to achieve detachment from the possessive women in Beckett's early fiction gives expression to the author's desire for exile as well as to distance himself from the predominant literary nationalism.

Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography by John Sutherland (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2??5 799 Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), the editors rightly claim that their book moves constructively beyond Trumpener, particularly in that it broadens the enquiry into Welsh Celticism, an area previously neglected in Romantic studies. Certainly, a strength of English Romanticism and the Celtic World is its diversity in approach, revealed most interestingly in analyses which converge from various directions on key moments or motifs; the resulting intertextuality proves fruitfulin? deed. One such cluster foregrounds the Welsh bardic tradition, taken up in Michael J. Franklin's discussion of the Celtic Revival, in Caroline Franklin's study of the Madoc legend, in William D. Brewer's treatment of bardic values in Hemans, and in J. R. Watson's study of Wordsworth and the 'Celtic landscape' of North Wales. James Macpherson's Ossian poems form another cluster: Dafydd R. Moore surveys their reception, and the vogue forOssian informs Murray Pittock's tour of 'Scott and the British tourist'. National myth-making, a fascinating map of which is drawn by David Punter's reading of Blake via Deleuze and Guattari, is considered elsewhere by Arthur Bradley in Shelley's conflation of Ireland and the Orient, and in Brewer's comparison of 'cosmopolitanism' in Byron and Hemans. Byron's ambivalent Scottishness is explored by both Bernard Beatty and Andrew Nicholson. Romantic legacy features in two of three contributions devoted to Ireland, in Malcolm Kelsall's treat? ment of Charles Lever's 1865 Luttrell of Arran and in Michael O'Neill's analysis of contemporary Northern Irish poetry. By its very nature (and paradoxically), an edited collection is filled with gaps, the importance of which varies according to reader expectations. James Hogg, for example, is virtually absent; yet in The Three Perils of Woman, in Queen Hynde, and in ballad- and song-collectinghe constructs Celticism in ways arguably more complex than Scott's and certainly less trampled by literarycritics. The Irish poet Mangan does not appear, though his response to Shelley would prove illuminating in terms of the book's concerns. While Welsh antiquarianism is dealt with in detail, that movement in other areas receives relatively little attention. And given the multilingual character of the 'four nations' under consideration, the lack of specific focus on language is surprising. This is a slim volume, however, and the fact that it does not cover all bases does not detract from its value. It engages crucial issues from the cutting edge of an emerging area of criticism, inviting a response that will prompt furtherventures into this dynamic field. University of Stirling Suzanne Gilbert Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography. By John Sutherland. London: Viking Penguin. 627 pp. ?25- ISBN 0-670-88303-4. Writing to Spender in April 1942, Auden suggested: 'I believe that you are a very strong, ruthless character [. . .] you escape fromthe guilt of having a destructive effect on those weaker than yourself, by imagining you are a sensitive sympathetic plant' (The Map of All My Youth: Early Works,Friends and Influences, ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 82). In reading John Sutherland's authoritative biography, Auden's portrait often comes to mind. One of its leitmotifs is Spender's uncomprehending response to critical attacks. Re? views of The Edge ofBeing (1949) made him resolve 'not to run the gauntlet of another volume of new poetry ever again' (Sutherland, p. 348). His dispute with the pugilistic right-wing poet Roy Campbell moved from the exchange of hostility in print to a physical assault at a wartime reading, to which Spender submitted himself with what 800 Reviews Bernard Bergonzi described as 'Christ-like passivity' (Sutherland, p. 343). Sutherland 's biography is littered with similar incidents: his Spender is a martyr to the calumny of critics and the mockery of friends. It is a portrait in keeping with World within World, where Spender recalls that as a child he 'often regretted that there were no great causes left to fight for; that I could not be crucified, nor go on a crusade' (World within World (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 2). If Spender brieflyfound his crusade in the Spanish Civil War, Sutherland suggests that he was crucified by critics...

Motivation and the adult Irish language learner

What motivates adult language learners in the city of Belfast to enrol and remain in an Irish class in the first years of the twenty-first century is the subject of the research study reported here. The research is placed within the context of the long history of interest in Irish revival in the city as far back as the eighteenth century and is related to relevant literature on motivation and language learning. The paper provides results from quantitative data collected by means of questionnaires issued to learners throughout the city. An overwhelming interest in culture is what primarily motivates these learners to enrol in an Irish class. Learners are also motivated by a strong sense of identity and by a felt obligation to help preserve the language. The paper illuminates issues of language restoration and the links between identity and language preservation. The research reported here contributes to the literatures on motivation, on adult learning and on language survival.

Rhythms of the Political: Peadar O'Donnell's Rural Fiction

In Peadar O'Donnell's last novel Proud Island, the author says of one character that "Susan Duffy . . . was a puzzle to people who liked to see life whole."1 This description could also be applied to many of the most interesting characters in his fiction, who are defined by troubled relationships to their homeland, and perhaps it captures the challenge of reading O'Donnell as well. In the shift from an individual to a community—from "Susan Duffy" to "people"—this single sentence embodies what may well be the primary issue in O'Donnell's work: the struggle between individual desires and communal patterns. The sentence also explicitly addresses an attitude toward tradition, summed up in the phrase "people who liked to see life whole," that is the elusive source of the energy in O'Donnell's prose—an intermittently yearning and satirical approach to group identity. O'Donnell's reputation as a literary figure is inextricable from his growing reputation as a political figure, as both a nationalist and a socialist—roles in which he forcefully expressed his solidarity with nation and class. But terms like "nationalist" and "socialist," while they aptly describe parts of O'Donnell's nonliterary life, at best can only obliquely reveal the considerable power of his fiction. Peadar O'Donnell is a writer of place—Donegal—and he knows and loves that place in ways that complement his life of public activism.2 Like more famous writers of the Irish Renaissance, most relevantly John Millington Synge, O'Donnell captures in great detail the world that was passing at the beginning [End Page 111] of the twentieth century. His knowledge of that part of the world was an insider's: born in western Donegal in 1893, his careers in early life included teaching, trade union organizing, and being a soldier. Peter Hegarty's thorough and readable 1999 study Peadar O'Donnell provides a rich recreation of his life and place, especially the social history of the part of the county called the Rosses and the political movements that provided the framework for all of O'Donnell's various careers.3 O'Donnell was active in the IRA, spent most of 1922 through 1924 in Irish jails, and became an ardent socialist. Storm, the first of his seven novels, appeared in 1925. In 1940 he founded The Bell, with Sean O'Faolain; O'Donnell served as editor 1946 to 1954. He remained active in Irish and global politics up until his death in 1986, achieving a sort of celebrity status late in life.4 Recent years have seen three very substantial monographs devoted to O'Donnell, which have provided more thorough treatments of his literary, personal, and political activities.5 O'Donnell's fiction portrays the lives of the rural villagers of Donegal, and much of the strength of this fiction seems to come from its nuanced representation of the relationship between tradition and change. O'Donnell's novels create a rhythmic alternation between the two human states of powerlessness and power. Many critics, in describing the strengths of O'Donnell's fiction, have praised his skill in rendering rural life by employing the literary categories of "realism" and "character." In The Irish Novel: A Critical History, James M. Cahalan discusses O'Donnell under the heading of "Exposé of Ireland: Realists, 1920–55"; more particularly, Cahalan sees O'Donnell as the successor to Liam O'Flaherty, and sees in him a writer who succeeds in portraying both the politics [End Page 112] of class and the powerful natural forces in the West of Ireland.6 As an example of critics' appreciation of O'Donnell's skill at creating character, Alexander G. Gonzalez writes of some of O'Donnell's most memorable portraits: "The everyday quality of their lives is better rendered, I believe, than by any other rural Irish novelist, past or present. Islanders and The Big Windows are...

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.

'A brief glow in the dark': Samuel Beckett's Presence in Modern Irish Poetry

One definition of 'Irish' that I liked a lot was Samuel Beckett's. When he was interviewed by a French journalist, the journalist said: 'Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?'. To which Beckett replied: 'Au contraire'. (Seamus Heaney) (1) In 1982, the same year he harnessed Samuel Beckett's quip to define a notion of Irishness, Seamus Heaney protested at his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by pointing out that his passport was green. It is somewhat surprising that Heaney would invoke Beckett in a discussion of Irish national identity, as the latter's attachment to the national colour--and much else--was rather problematic. A week after the 1931 publication of Beckett's first book, Proust, in Chatto & Windus's 'Dolphin' series, the editor Charles Prentice wrote to Beckett apologizing for the fact that the front cover was brown rather than green: 'Clearly I have been trying to steal you from Ireland.' (2) Beckett's answer, that he had 'not noticed whether the Dolphin was green or brown', represents an early instance of what would become a lifelong ambivalence towards his native country. (3) This studied indifference is evident again in 1938, when Beckett describes Routledge's 'effort to make an Irishman of me' in the blurb to his novel Murphy as 'touching'. (4) Such efforts largely disappeared, however, following his permanent departure from the 'land of my unsuccessful abortion' for France, where 'the little operation is cheap, safe, legal + popular', not to mention his adoption of French as his creative medium. (5) Resurfacing only briefly during the 1956 Dublin production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett remained largely outside further developments in Irish cultural events until the early 1970s. (6) The timing of this (re)integration into collective cultural consciousness naturally owes much to the award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, but is surely also related to the eruption of the Troubles in that same year. In a climate where questions of identity, place, and displacement, and the role of the artist within society were highly charged, many Irish poets looked to Beckett's experiences when wondering, as Paul Muldoon does in '7, Middagh Street', 'Which side was I on? | Not one, or both, or none.' (7) This development is somewhat like that observable in post-war Germany, where Adorno's essay 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen' made Beckett central to socio-cultural and philosophical debates over the role, and possibility, of art in a society irredeemably altered by the Holocaust. (8) Yet in contrast to the efforts of German sociologists and philosophers to set Beckett into a more abstract and universal context, in Ireland, creative writers have entered into a more textual dialogue with Beckett's work, in an effort to investigate their own roles in the Irish community. In this undertaking, they have concentrated on Beckett's writings as creative texts, not merely as philosophical texts, whereby their religious and political aspects as well as largely ignored parts of his oeuvre have been explored. Thus the neglected field of Beckett's poetry has been discussed by Irish poets, amongst others Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and David Wheatley, often in scholarly Beckett journals. This essay will trace and explore the presence of Beckett in modern Irish poetry, particularly in that of Derek Mahon. Ruptures The Irish revival of critical interest in Beckett's work in the 1970s started a process of reappropriation, leading, for example, to John Montague's solicitation of Beckett (a few months before his death in 1989) for a contribution to The Great Book of Ireland compiled by 'Poetry Ireland'. (9) The first, most important event in the process of reintroducing Beckett into Irish cultural discussions after the Second World War was the republication of his 1934 essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' in the fourth number of The Lace Curtain in 1971 by the poets Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce. …

Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

Editors’ NotesNótaí na nEagarthóirí In 1892, Douglas Hyde gave his seminal address on the "Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland," and over the next century the discussion of Ireland's linguistic identity was inevitably framed in terms of Gaeilge versus English. Today, asylum seekers and economic immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the former Eastern bloc—as well as from immigrants from within the European Union—have begun to restructure the Irish demographic, and in the process, have created a language environment that Hyde could never have envisioned. The Irish radio airwaves now carry broadcasts in Bosnian, Mandarin, and other languages; the needs of an ever-more-polyglot Ireland are reshaping the health, social service, and judicial systems—and these changes also spill into the familiar social laboratory of the classroom. As Dr. Cronin notes, a multilingual Ireland will necessarily invite a rethinking of the state's official bilingualism. The director of Dublin City University's Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Michael Cronin's many books include The Languages of Ireland (2003). Familiar to students of post-Revival Irish drama for his biographical study T. C. Murray: Dramatist of Rural Ireland (2003), Albert De Giacomo (along with Jonas Friddle, an actor, theatrical technician, and student of drama) calls our attention in this issue to still another playwright deserving of renewed attention. That person is Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell (1894-1976), whose scripts were mainstays of the Irish amateur repertoire during his lifetime, and whose 1919 play The Dawn Mist gained special notoriety for attracting political censorship. In the first of a two-part article, De Giacomo and Friddle examine O'Donnell's dramatic apprenticeship, a period in which his ambitions ran somewhat ahead of his talents. Even so, O'Donnell caught the attention of Yeats, Lennox Robinson, and other theatrical luminaries, and the memory of their encouragements may lie behind O'Donnell's practical efforts in later life to assist young Irish writers and artists. Irish-American poetry can claim a long heritage in American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Daniel Tobin reveals in New Hibernia Review (Winter, 1999). Irish Americans have been newspaper poets [End Page 5] and balladeers in the Victorian mode, and radicals and experimenters in the Modernist mode. Now the Ruth Little Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Maura Stanton became a Yale Younger Poet in 1975 with her first collection Snow on Snow. Three collections followed: Tales of the Supernatural (1988), Cries of Swimmers (1991), and Life among the Trolls (1998). In this issue, she shows her range and subtlety in monologues that affectingly capture both nuances of individual voice and character and the regrets and elations of Irish Americans in the Midwest at midcentury. Plainly worded, simply lined out, these poems display a complex moral imagination. Maura Stanton's other titles are The Country ICome From (1988), a set of short stories, and a novel, Molly Companion (1977). For a full century after his execution, the memory of the youthful patriot Robert Emmet wove its way into the imaginations of Irish America, where—in oratory and verse, in lithography and melodrama—a veritable Emmet industry kept the hero's memory alive. In this issue, Dr. Charles Fanning tracks the development of the Emmet cult in the United States, a story that Fanning tells with characteristic sensitivity to the overflowing range of Irish-American creativity. At times, this cult could be brazenly commercial, used to sell cigars and tourist trinkets; other times, particularly on stage, it played fast and loose with historical fact. Overall, though, the invocation of Emmet was positive: by providing both personal and community links to an heroic, thrilling figure, the patriot's memory proved deeply ennobling. The preeminent scholar of Irish-American literature, Charles Fanning is the author of The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction From the 1760s to the 1980s (1999). A leading figure of the Irish Revival, George Russell (Æ) claimed the distinction of being not only a poet and a painter, a polymath and a spiritualist, but also a commentator on social and economic practicalities. As Leeann Lane reminds us here, for more than forty years he wrote tirelessly...

Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (review)

Reviewed by: Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival James Pethica Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. x + 277. $95.00 (cloth). In his final years, W. B. Yeats defiantly described himself as one of the "last romantics." He claimed that "alone in modern times" he and his fellow Abbey Theatre playwrights J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory had drawn "all that we said or sang" from "contact with the soil" and from their "[d]ream of the noble and the beggar-man."1 While the impact of class, religious affiliation, gender, and proficiency in the Irish language have all been considered as significant factors shaping the ways Irish Revival writers recruited folklore and the figure of the peasant to promote their competing conceptions of "authentic" Irishness, Sinéad Garrigan Mattar's book is the first extended study to attend to the impact of late nineteenth-century developments in comparative anthropology as an influence on major figures of the movement. Focusing on the work of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory to 1909, Mattar argues that their folklore gatherings and representations of Irish peasant culture have consistently been misread as predominantly informed by unreconstructed early-nineteenth century Romantic notions of the primitive. The image of the "noble savage" was indeed alluring to all three writers, and each conceived of an Edenic golden age and its surviving traces in rural Ireland as to some extent a potential antidote to what Yeats termed the "filthy modern tide" of contemporary life.2 But as Mattar emphasizes, Yeats and Synge were by 1900 well read in recent developments in anthropology. They were thus obliged to reassess both their own idealizing impulses, and the core assumptions of Romantic Celticism generally, in the light of scholarship that insisted on rigorous documentation of source materials, comprehensive historical knowledge, and, most of all, an objective and stringently comparative view of individual cultural practices. The work of Lang, Frazer and others prevented them from slipping into an easy reduplication of the idealized views of nationhood and the discourse of crude racial typographies that had marked most prior approaches to Irish folklore. It was thus a key influence on their evolving conceptions of Irish nationality. Their broader efforts to come to terms with comparative science, Mattar suggests, also place them as important transitional figures anticipating the modernist primitivism of Joyce, T. S. Eliot and others. In her reading, Yeats and Synge are positioned as what she wryly terms the "missing link" (1), functioning as "last romantics" obliged by their encounters with comparative anthropology to evolve into the "first modernists" (247). Mattar begins by tracing the rise of Celticism as a discipline, highlighting the emerging strains in the nineteenth century between the scholarly (or "critical") approach to Irish folklore and legend, and the Romantic (and typically patriotic) mode prevalent amongst Irish writers and artists. Already marked in Matthew Arnold's influential but conflicted 1860s lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature, these strains intensified into open hostility once the Revue celtique began to excoriate the merely "poetic" school of Celticism after 1886. At the very moment the [End Page 832] Irish Revival was stirring into self-consciousness, Mattar argues, time was running out for the "romantically primitivist vision of Ireland" (20). Yeats is the subject of two of the book's four chapters with a single-author focus. In "Yeats, Celticism, Comparative Science" Mattar shows that Yeats was "acutely aware of the division between 'scientific' and 'literary' versions of folklore" early in his career (44). He zealously claimed in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) that the Celts of the western seaboard had remained untouched by modernity, and retained visionary forms of knowledge lost to people of the cities. At the same time,though, he was striving to assimilate the work of Alfred Nutt, John Rhys, de Jubainville and others suspicious of, or hostile to, "poetic" racial primitivism. He consequently took care to claim that his gatherings contained nothing that he had merely imagined, even while simultaneously emphasizing that he viewed folklore's primary importance as being a source of imaginative inspiration. From around 1896, however, under the influence of Andrew...

The Cuala Press: Women, publishing, and the conflicted genealogies of ‘feminist publishing’

The Cuala Press, a fine art press run by Elizabeth Yeats around Dublin during the first half of the twentieth century, has long been recognised amongst scholars of Irish literature and history. But the press has been analysed almost exclusively through the interpretative lenses of poet W.B. Yeats, the Yeats family, and the Irish Renaissance. The article challenges such received understandings of Cuala by considering the press as a gendered publishing enterprise: one run by a woman, employing only women, and designed to create work and economic independence for Irish working girls. Through examining the origins of Cuala, the locus of editorial power within the press, and Cuala's complexly ambivalent relationship with modernist Irish suffrage and nationalist women's networks, the article situates the post-1970 feminist publishing boom within a historical trajectory. It suggests that scholarly knowledge of women's publishing history may be crucially dependent upon the health of contemporary feminist presses. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Irish orientalism: a literary and intellectual history

Centuries before W. B. Years wove Indian, Japanese, and Irish forms together in his poetry and plays, Irish writers found kinships in Asian and West Asian cultures. This book maps the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism within Ireland's complex colonial heritage. Relying on cultural and postcolonial theory, Joseph Lennon examines Irish impressions of Asia and West Asia, understood together as the Orient in the West. British writers from Cambrensis to Spenser depicted Ireland as a remote border land inhabited by wild descendants of Asian Scythians - barbarians to the ancient Greeks. Contemporaneous Irish writers likewise borrowed classical traditions, imagining the Orient as an ancient homeland. Lennon traces Irish Orientalism through origin legends, philology, antiquarianism, historiography into Irish literature and culture, exploring the works of Keating, O'Flaherty, Swift, Vallancey, Sheridan, Moore, Croker, Owenson, Mangan, de Vere, and others. He focuses on a key moment of Irish Orientalism - the twentieth-century Celtic Revival - discussing the works of Gregory, Casement, and Joyce, but focusing on Theosophist writers W. B. Yeats, George Russell, James Stephens, and James Cousins.

The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland?s Celtic Revival

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.

Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848-1916 (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916 Frank A. Biletz Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916. By Kevin Collins. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon.2002. Pp. 203. $50.00.) Historical accounts of the Celtic, or Gaelic, cultural revival in Ireland, which occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have generally emphasized the significance of secular organizations, such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (founded in 1884) and the Gaelic League (1893), while suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church was, despite the participation of many priests in the movement, largely indifferent and, at times, even hostile to the cause of preserving traditional Gaelic culture and reviving the Irish language. Such narratives tend to locate the origins of Irish cultural nationalism in Thomas Davis, who as one of the leaders of the non-sectarian Young Ireland movement of the 1840's coupled advocacy of Irish political independence with calls for preserving the Irish language. Kevin Collins's useful and lucidly written study convincingly establishes a central and ongoing role in all phases of the Celtic revival for the Catholic clergy, including many prominent bishops, and argues that an unbreakable bond between Gaelic culture and the Catholic faith began to emerge in the writings of the historian Geoffrey Keating and other post-Reformation Irish Catholics as early as the seventeenth century. Despite continuing differences about political tactics, the Irish Catholic clergy and revolutionary nationalists had come, by the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, to conceive the Irish nation as being necessarily rooted in Gaelic cultural traditions and also inherently Catholic. Collins argues convincingly that clerical involvement in the Celtic revival was decisive and that, ultimately, the activities of Catholic bishops and priests were far more influential in instilling a sense of pride in the national cultural heritage among the masses of Irish people than such elite movements as the Anglo-Irish literary revival. Rather than following the familiar line of descent for the ideal of an "Irish Ireland," which runs from Davis through Douglas Hyde and D. P. Moran and culminates in Padraic Pearse, one of the martyrs of 1916, Collins details contributions of equal or even greater significance made by such Catholic priests as Father John Lanigan (1758-1828), Canon Ulick Bourke (1829-1887), Father Peter O'Leary (1839-1920), Father Patrick Dinneen (1860-1934), Father Michael O'Hickey (1861-1917), and Father Eugene O'Growney (1863-1899). While Lanigan was an antiquarian and church historian of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the others were all active in the Irish language movement during the Celtic revival. Collins also highlights the strong support given the Irish language and Gaelic culture by Archbishop John MacHale (1791-1881) of Tuam, who translated much of The Iliad into Irish, Archbishop Thomas William Croke (1823-1902) of Cashel, who served as a patron of the Gaelic Athletic Association, and other bishops. Especially revealing is Collins's treatment of Paul Cardinal Cullen (1802-1878), commonly regarded as an enemy of the national cause because of his firm opposition to the revolutionary Fenians. Collins points out, however, that Cullen strongly supported an Irish identity that was both Catholic and Gaelic, and regarded the "golden age" of "saints and scholars" in early medieval Ireland as the foundation of a continuous national historical tradition, the strength of which had allowed the Irish people to endure such subsequent traumas [End Page 331] as the Penal Laws of the eighteenth century and the Great Famine of the 1840's without sacrificing either their national identity or their faith. Although their mutual participation in the Celtic revival provided clerical and lay cultural nationalists in Ireland a common perspective on the nature of Irish identity, they still had very significant differences about particular issues. A controversy erupted in 1909, for instance, over the status of the Irish language at the new National University. Contrary to Gaelic League demands, the Catholicbishops opposed making it mandatory for matriculation. Father Michael O'Hickey, professor of Irish at the seminary at Maynooth, was dismissed because of his outspoken support of the League. Although Collins rightly balances this...

Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett's Narrative Poetics by Paul B. Kelley (review)

478 Reviews ceremonial failure, the self-conscious attempt to find redemption through gestural sacrifice, rather than through pragmatic military strategy. McDonald's opening chapter moves from an intelligently wary analysis of the apparently endless series of qualifications and hair-splitting discriminations surrounding definitions of tragedy, and the restlessness of twentieth-century tragedy in its inherited forms and traditions, to a specific discussion of tragedy and Irish cultural history. He is at his most incisive on the various 'tragic' readings of Irish historical events?the Great Famine, the 1916 Rising, the 'Troubles'?suggesting various models of tragedy through which these have been constructed or rehabilitated: ritualistic sacrifice, heroism in defeat, nobility. Despite its prevalence in the Irish historical imagination, all three of McDonald's chosen writers react against this tendency in differentways. Although his choice of Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett is made for reasons of contrast as well as comparison, all three dramatists under consideration, just as they react against the mythic values of the Celtic Revival, react against the sort of ritualistic mythology that transforms failure into success. Synge's drama veers between confrontation with the squalor of peasant life and a lyrical evasion of it, while O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars was one of the firstand most notable attempts to usurp the prevalent 'heroic' with the wasteful view of the 1916 Rising. Beckett's plays, on the other hand, demonstrate an inability to cohere into anything approaching tragic grandeur. All three are celebrated forstylistic and generic heterogeneity, forentwining comic and tragic moods; in terms of classical or strictly Hellenic definitions of tragedy, all three would seem unlikely tragedians. This study identifies central issues in the three dramatists?evasion in Synge, meliorism in O'Casey, confusion in Beckett?through which central issues in tragic theory and their drama's very various relations to the central conundrum of 'tragic value' can be discussed. However, a strength of the book is that, rather than testing the three authors against a predetermined definition of tragedy, McDonald aims to examine their philosophies and aesthetics of suffering,loss, and guilt within less exclusive framing ideas of tragedy. Much of the value of Tragedy and Irish Literature is simply in the application of tragic theory?a notoriously defensive and exclusive school, reluctant to admit into the company of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine anything smacking of evasion, meliorism, or confusion?to a disparate trio of dramatists whose modernity and en? gagement with ('tragic'?) Irishness puts them in a less straightforward relation with tragedy. McDonald's study both yields insights into what definitions of tragedy say about the society which makes them, and, farfromcoercing a trio of disparate drama? tists into a classical definition of tragedy to which they have no allegiance, uses the exigencies and nuances of tragic theory as a way of casting new light on three distinct oeuvres. National University of Ireland, Galway Sinead Mooney Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett's Narrative Poetics. By Paul B. Kelley. Fore? word by Sjef Houppermans. (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, iii) New York, Bern, and Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang. 2002. xv+ 198 pp. ?37. ISBN 0-8204-5791-4. Paul B. Kelley has derived his title from the 1967 Grove Press compilation published in England as No's Knife: Collected Shorter Prose ig4y-ig66. As unpublished corre? spondence reveals, Beckett's working title for what was to become Stories and Texts for Nothing in the USA was Stories Stories, the collection initially comprising the post-war nouvelles (his firstprose fiction to be composed originally in French) and the recent 'residua', the Texts in new English versions being added at the last minute. MLR, 99.2, 2004 479 In his six chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion Kelley not unnaturally includes the Texts (or rather the Textes, since throughout he quotes from Beckett's French and from his English only to highlight a point), but excludes the nouvelles, which are not even mentioned in the index. Beckett self-confessedly thought them the 'uninteresting' part of his 'little book of odds and ends', but they were steps on the way to Molloy (Kelley's starting point) and there was surely room for...

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

English Romanticism and the Celtic world

Introduction: romancing the Celt Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes 2. 'And the Celt Knew the Indian': Sir William Jones, the Celtic Revival and the Oriental Renaissance Michael Franklin 3. 'Our Names may be Heard in Song. But what avails it when our strength has ceased?': the critical response to Ossian's Romantic bequest Dafydd R. Moore 4. Blake and Gwendolen: territory, periphery and the proper name David Punter 5. The Welsh American Dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc Legend Caroline Franklin 6. Wordsworth, north Wales, and the Celtic landscape J. R. Watson 7. 'My Mother's Gordons': the force of 'Celtic memories' in Byron's thought Bernard Beatty 8. 'The Revolt of Erin': Ireland and Islam in Shelley's oriental poetry Arthur Bradley 9. Byron and 'The Ariosto of the North' Andrew Nicholson 10. Scott and the British tourist Murray G. H. Pittock 11. Felicia Hemans, Byronic cosmopolitanism, and the ancient Welsh bards William D. Brewer 12. Writing which nation? Luttrell of Arran and the Romantic invention of Ireland Malcolm Kelsall 13. 'Shining in Modest Glory': Contemporary Northern Irish poets and Romantic poetry Michael O'Neill.

Joyce and the Two Irelands by Willard Potts (review)

YES,34, 2004 YES,34, 2004 3I9 3I9 from them all. The exercise is not without use: there are the seeds, for instance, of a very distinguishedpostcolonial reading of Ulyssesin McGee's book. The trouble is that they are given no space to grow. The book disintegratesinto a collection of partly related essays. More importantly,for all his concern with 'history',the only historical context that, for McGee, is truly crucial to Joyce studies is the contemporary Rawlsian academy, and the politics he addresseshas little or no historical substancebeyond it. Perhapshe ought to spend a few years in Derry. ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITYOF LONDON ANDREW GIBSON JoyceandtheTwoIrelands. By WILLARD POTTS. (LiteraryModernism Series)Austin: University of Texas Press. 2001. xi + 220 pp. [28.50. The 'two Irelands'implicatedin the title of this new studyofJamesJoyce's workare the Catholic and the Protestant,of course, but it is importantfor Willard Potts to read in a sectariandivisionacrossIrishsociety the widest culturalimplications.Joyce andtheTwoIrelands chartsin his fiction, drama, and criticalwritingsthe reaction of JamesJoyce notjust to the divisionsthat have definedhis homeland but to a variety of efforts to heal these rifts. Specifically, Potts wonders what reactionJoyce had to the 'Irish Revival', to the literary expression of Irish nationalism that asserted itself most clearly at the beginning of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly,the author discovers in Joyce's work an equivocal attitude towards all expressions of nationalismbroken only by signatureperiods of interestin all things Irish,brief but fervent intervalsthat punctuatedJoyce's life abroad on the continent. Potts begins with a surveyof the modern culturalhistoryof Ireland, concentrating on an importantthirty-yearperiod beginning in the I89os. While this is necessary background, some of this material is only tangentiallyconnected withJoyce, and the text really hits its stride once Potts turns his attention to Joyce's more dogmatic earlywritings:essaysand reviewswrittenin the firstyearsof the twentieth century. While he retreatedfrom specificpolitical issues behind Giordano Bruno's assertionthat writersshould seek a certain degree of aesthetic monasticism,Joyce's preferencefor art with an internationalgroundingboth connected him with a burgeoning modernismand estrangedhim from the earlyundertakingsof Revival writers . On the other hand, his I907 essay 'Ireland:Island of Saints and Sages' reveals a most pronounced interestin the Revival and in the conjugationof sectarianissues. The sum of this critical output underlines how Joyce's aloofness concealed a discerning mind capable of weighing the most contentious questions relevant to Irish culture. And while the author may have appeared aloof, his creative works gave voice to a well-defined understandingof issues that enabled him to use different approaches to nationalistconcerns for dramatic effect. A number of the stories in Dubliners, for example, engage social issuesand suggestof their authora keen critical eye, but his progressionfrom the manuscriptfor Stephen Herothrough to the publication of A Portrait oftheArtistas a Young Manindicatesan increasingdisillusionment with Irish nationalism.While the influence of continentaldrama on Exilesstandsin contrast to the work of Synge and Yeats, the play itself is sympathetic to Revival ideas. With Ulysses,Joyce extends his satirical reading of Irish nationalism to considerall expressionsof nationalism,underliningthroughthe violence and racism of the novel the dangers of partisancitizenship. from them all. The exercise is not without use: there are the seeds, for instance, of a very distinguishedpostcolonial reading of Ulyssesin McGee's book. The trouble is that they are given no space to grow. The book disintegratesinto a collection of partly related essays. More importantly,for all his concern with 'history',the only historical context that, for McGee, is truly crucial to Joyce studies is the contemporary Rawlsian academy, and the politics he addresseshas little or no historical substancebeyond it. Perhapshe ought to spend a few years in Derry. ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITYOF LONDON ANDREW GIBSON JoyceandtheTwoIrelands. By WILLARD POTTS. (LiteraryModernism Series)Austin: University of Texas Press. 2001. xi + 220 pp. [28.50. The 'two Irelands'implicatedin the title of this new studyofJamesJoyce's workare the Catholic and the Protestant,of course, but it is importantfor Willard Potts to read in a sectariandivisionacrossIrishsociety the widest culturalimplications.Joyce andtheTwoIrelands chartsin his fiction, drama, and criticalwritingsthe reaction of JamesJoyce notjust to the divisionsthat have definedhis homeland but to a variety of efforts to heal these rifts. Specifically, Potts wonders what reactionJoyce had to the 'Irish Revival', to the literary expression of...

Working Bodies, Celtic Textiles, and the Donegal Industrial Fund 1883–1890

This article seeks to discuss the promotion of Irish textile art made by the Donegal Industrial Fund as part of the late-nineteenth-century Celtic revival, to examine the display and consumption of this art in Britain by focusing upon the Fund's contributions to the Health Exhibition (1884), the International Inventions Exhibition (1885), the International Exhibition of Industry, Science, and Art (Edinburgh 1886), and the Irish Exhibition (1888), and to elaborate upon the replacement (or displacement) of Irish “girls” put on view as working/living textiles. The display of Irish textiles in London attracted unparalleled attention during the 1880s that both coincided with the increased interest in cottage crafts as promoted by advocates of home arts and industries movements and paralleled the intensified political activity associated with Home Rule activists. The Donegal Industrial Fund under the auspices of Londoner Alice Rowland Hart characterized the intensity of the relationship between textiles and cultural identity while, at the same time, it signaled the multifarious albeit layered tensions between English patronage and Celtic revival.

Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement

This book works against the orthodoxy that the Irish Revival was as a purely mystical affair of high culture characterised by a preoccupation with a backward-looking Celtic spirituality, nostalgia for Gaelic Ireland and an obsessive anti-modern traditionalism. The central argument advanced is that the Irish Revival can be understood as a progressive period that witnessed the co-operation of various self-help movements--the Abbey Theatre, the Gaelic League and the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society--to encourage local modes of material and cultural development. What bound these disparate groups together was their readiness to use traditional cultural forms as the basis for an alternative modernisation project. So successful were these self-help initiatives that they very quickly opened up a rival sphere of influence to parliamentary politics. Much of this activity laid the groundwork for the emergence of Sinn Fein in 1905. With particular reference to important theatre productions of the period, this study traces the connections and overlaps between these radical movements, both at executive and grass roots level, and argues that the self-help idea was crucial to the decolonisation and modernisation of Irish society during the early years of the twentieth century.