Literary Revival Research Articles

Competing Languages of Czech Nation-Building: Jan Kollár and the Melodiousness of Czech

In the modern era, the institution of literature is being reconceived across Europe as a national institution. But the new paradigm of national literatures requires a remaking of literary discourse, including the transformation of critical terminology, and this results in literary discourse becoming politicized. By analyzing the history of the term libozvučnost (melodiousness) in the Czech national literary revival, David L. Cooper demonstrates how this seemingly innocent literary term became a political lightening rod for friends pursuing the same national program. This strongly suggests that, in the formative era of national literatures, using literary issues to discuss politics is not simply a matter of instrumentalizing literary criticism for covert political activity but that discussing literary values is directly political. The example of libozvučnost also reveals how the “borrowed“ discourses of Romanticism and nationalism were fundamentally remade to respond to the modern Czech situation.

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

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

Revisiting the Catholic Literary Imagination

Revisiting the Catholic Literary Imagination Douglas Robillard Jr. (bio) Jeana DelRosso. Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives. New York: Palgrave, 2005. x + 203 pp. Farrell O’Gorman. Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2004. ix + 259 pp. Susan Srigley. Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2005. xii + 195 pp. During the last fifteen years we have seen some renewal of interest in the subject of Catholicism and literature. Since the publication of Arnold Sparr's 1990 study, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–60, Joseph Pearce, Ross Labrie, and others have published books on the influence of Catholicism on film, art, and literature.1 Much of the current scholarship examines what Sparr terms the post-World War II "Catholic literary revival" (xi). This development was sparked by European thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and others who brought the theology and aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas into the twentieth century. At the time, there was considerable interest in contemporary Catholic authors such as [End Page 174] Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. In the same period, Allen Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, converted to Catholicism under Maritain's personal influence and actively sought to promote an American Catholic literature. They also acted as mentors for two younger Catholic Southern writers, Flannery O'Connor and a convert, Walker Percy. In time, this literary trend ended. O'Connor died in 1964. Percy continued publishing into the 1980s. However, in many ways, Gene Kellogg's 1970 study, The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period of Convergence both summarized and brought an end to this period. Some of the questions posed during the Catholic literary revival have resurfaced. What is meant by the term, "Catholic literature"? Is there a distinct Catholic literature rooted in a definable aesthetic? What are the features of the Catholic literary imagination? How is the Church itself portrayed in literature? Three recent books examine the influence Catholicism exercises over the literary imagination. In its own way, each attempts to answer the questions posed above. Two studies deal specifically with Flannery O'Connor: Susan Srigley's Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Art and Farrell O'Gorman's Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Srigley locates the origins of O'Connor's aesthetics in Thomism and Catholic doctrine. She takes a deliberately restricted view of her subject, limiting her discussion to only three of O'Connor's works: the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and a single short story, "Revelation." Peculiar Crossroads divides its discussion between O'Connor and Walker Percy and examines biographical as well as literary and theological affinities between the authors. Like Srigley, he identifies Thomist thought as an important influence on O'Connor's aesthetics. In addition, he presents a fascinating account of the literary and theological interactions of O'Connor and Percy with Tate and Gordon. The third book, Jeana DelRosso's Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives, is an investigation of contemporary Catholic women's literature across cultural and ethnic lines, touching only briefly and peripherally on O'Connor. Instead, DelRosso is concerned with the broad question of how women writers of diverse ethnic and national origins "challenge and embrace" the Roman Catholic Church in their fiction and autobiographical narratives (5). Srigley and O'Gorman agree on the importance of Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism to the development of O'Connor's aesthetic. O'Gorman calls the book "the essential starting point in any discussion of O'Connor's and Percy's commitment to realism and an important source for their understanding of art's moral function" [End Page 175] (109–10). Srigley sees O'Connor's theology and art coming together in an "ethic of responsibility" toward others (10). "My concern is to demonstrate how O'Connor's ethics are inextricably linked to her role as a storyteller and how her moral vision is played out in the drama of her fiction" writes...

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

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

'Exile-and-return' and English Law: The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance of Insular Romance

This article offers a new interpretation of the development of insular romance, drawing on texts and events in the pre-Conquest period to suggest a much greater degree of cultural continuity across the Conquest than has previously been recognised. One strand of recent scholarship has elucidated the prevalence of the ‘exile-and-return’ theme in twelfth- and thirteenth-century insular French romance, and the political force of this ideology. Another has discussed the tendency of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Middle English romance to construct the Anglo-Saxon past as a legal golden age, using this trope to support a strong national identity. This article suggests that both of these tropes – the exile-and-return of the king, and the idea of good English Law – are in fact not post-Conquest inventions, as has been assumed, but are rather derived from pre-Conquest events and texts. This is a part of the author's general contention that a strong English identity can be seen to have survived the Conquest, and to have been expressed in French and Latin throughout the twelfth century, before the literary revival of English. Here it is argued that the two ideas are fundamentally intertwined, are essentially English, and are a genuine inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon past, in a manner which has not previously been acknowledged.

The Victorian Fathers Of The Irish Literary Revival

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

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

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

UNNAMING THE SUBJECT: Samuel Beckett and Colonial Alterity

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

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

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

Essentialist Agendas: The Irish Revival

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

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

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

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...

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

Unfinalized Moments in Jewish American Narrative

In Jewish fiction studies, it has become common practice to reference Irving Howe's pronouncement on what he saw as waning influence of this literature. So much so, in fact, that constant citation of it (present essay included) begins to take on cadence of an ironic mantra, one chanted to invoke spirit of literary authenticity. One is even tempted, given our sound bite-laden culture, to encapsulate his views with pithy phrase, the Howe Doctrine (these introductory comments, however, will resist temptation). It all began in introduction to his 1977 collection of Jewish stories, where Howe broods over his belief that American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories. Other than in books and sentiment, there just isn't enough left of that experience.(1) To a certain degree, such an outlook is understandable, coming from author of World of Our Fathers, a text whose foundation is Jewish immigrant experience. Yet what makes this literary forecast ironically poignant is that it introduces a first-of-its-kind manuscript, collection of contemporary Jewish narrative. In one fell -- yet curious -- swoop, Howe celebrates centrality of Jewish literature at same time that he mourns its passing. It is as if a distinguished collector had displayed, for all his guests to see, a grand exhibition of significance. Yet in process of doing so, he kills off very subject of his admiration, much as a butterfly collector must place his specimens in ethyl acetate before they can be properly mounted and showcased. very act of finalizing literary moment secures its place in history, creating in process an inert yet brilliant museum piece. While such a simile may appear excessive on first reading, one should keep in mind that Howe was not alone in ringing death knell, or perhaps reciting Kaddish. In a 1976 article Ruth Wisse, a critic that Howe himself cited to confirm his suppositions, uses rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Howe's. The career of Jewish literature would seem to have reached a turning point, she provocatively asserts, eventually concluding that [f]or those who take Judaism seriously as a cultural alternative, and wish to weave new brilliant cloth from its ancient threads, sociological reality of present-day Jewish community would seem to present an almost insurmountable obstacle.(2) Perhaps even more dour, although not nearly as referenced as Howe's or Wisse's, is Leslie Fiedler's unequivocal assertion roughly ten years later that the Jewish-American novel is over and done with, a part of history rather than a living literature.(3) These grim predictions serve as a backdrop, ironically enough, for what has become over past few years an emergent body of scholarship on most generation of Jewish writers. present special issue of Shofar is just latest in this ongoing recognition. With a variety of forms and focusing on a diversely rich selection of writers, contributors to this volume assert ongoing vitality of Jewish fiction. They find in authors such as Allegra Goodman, Michael Chabon, Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, Jonathan Rosen, Nathan Englander, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Tova Reich, and Jonathan Safran Foer an argument against kind of finality reported by Howe, Wisse, and Fiedler. Or, to paraphrase another famous literary dictum, each of seven essays in this collection underscores fact that reports of death of Jewish fiction are greatly exaggerated. During past ten years, and especially since late 1990s, there has been a growing critical awareness of what many have seen as a Jewish literary revival. …

‘I Will Tell You a Word or Two About Cardiganshire’: Welsh Clerics and Literature in the Eighteenth Century

In the process often characterized by Welsh historians as ‘the remaking of Wales in the eighteenth century’, the clergy played a central role in the literary and national revival. While the national and international contexts of these cultural movements are of paramount importance, particularities also count, and need to be integrated into the larger picture. An examination of the special flavour of the careers of several literary-minded clerics and other writers in the deeply rural county of Cardiganshire offers a means of throwing light on some of these broader themes, and of illustrating the importance of literacy, culture, and learning to relatively humble middling sorts within a particular community notorious for its isolation, poor communications, monoglottism, and slow-moving economy.

Irish Tradition or Postdramatic Innovation? Storytelling in Contemporary Irish Plays

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

The Heritage of Elegy in The Crying Game (1993)

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

The Shock of the Old: Translating Early Irish Poetry into Modern Irish

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD: TRANSLATING EARLY IRISH POETRY INTO MODERN IRISH KAARINA HOLLO twentieth-century readers of English without a knowledge of Old Irish (ca. 600–900 a.d.) or Middle Irish (ca. 900–1200 a.d.) were given reasonably good access to early medieval Irish poetry through the medium of the translation anthology. Through the efforts of Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, Gerard Murphy, Frank O’Connor, and others, a good amount of early Irish verse written between the seventh and twelfth centuries was made available to English-language audiences.1 But what of translation of this poetry into Modern Irish? Who undertook this task, for what reasons, and to what effect? From the very beginnings of the Gaelic Literary Revival, there had been calls for the translation of medieval Irish literature into Modern Irish. The ordinary reader of Modern Irish would not be able to make much sense of an early medieval Irish story or poem. Thus, at the time, in order to access a substantial portion of the medieval literary tradition, a Modern Irish speaker would generally turn to English translations provided in more or less scholarly editions or to the more literary reworkings provided, again in English, by the likes of Lady Gregory (1902, 1904) and Standish O’Grady (1878–80, 1894). Learning the earlier forms of the language was a daunting task, not one that the average reader of Irish with an interest in the earlier literature could be expected to undertake. This meant that the Irish reader’s experience of older Irish texts was essentially mediated by English. In 1900 the perceived need for translations directly from the ancestral language into Modern Irish was formally acknowledged by the OireachTRANSLATING EARLY IRISH POETRY INTO MODERN IRISH 54 1 See, for example, Meyer 1911; Flower 1926; Murphy 1956; Greene and O’Connor 1967. For a thorough discussion of the ideological and political dimensions of translation from Old and Middle Irish into English, see Tymoczko 1999. I wish to thank the joint editors of this volume for their thoughtful and constructive comments on several drafts of this paper. tas2 in the institution of a prize for “the best modernized version of a tale or episode from Old or Middle Irish” (O’Leary 1994:233). Philip O’Leary has identified three main rationales for such modernization: (1) an awareness of the linguistic, historical, and cultural value of the early literature; (2) ideological grounds; and (3) a view of medieval Irish literature as providing a model for modern writing in Irish (1994:268–70). It is hard to disentangle the three, and separating them risks reductionism: for example, there is certainly an ideological element to the belief that medieval Irish literature is intrinsically valuable and that it can provide a model for contemporary authors. Speaking of the period 1922–39, O’Leary writes that what Gaelic activists wanted was for native scholars to use their learning to enrich contemporary Irish reality by restoring to the nation an authentic and accessible sense of its own past. In practical terms one of the central features of this project would be the immediate provision of competent Modern Irish versions, translations, of the full range of earlier Irish literature. (1998:201) The translation efforts undertaken on this front were almost exclusively from the prose tradition. Until the mid-twentieth century, verse seems to have been more or less ignored. The great early Irish prose narratives such as Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge, modern “Cooley”) were seen as constitutive of and more essential to Irish national identity than were the religious, personal, and love poems from the same period. Therefore earlier translation efforts were centered on the prose, but by mid-century, with Irish political independence a reality, it was possible to turn to works that could not be so easily pressed into the mold of a heroic national ethos, such as lyric verse.3 We will focus here on the translations done by two men, both of them significant figures in the mid-twentieth-century Irish literary world. Tomás Ó Floinn published two collections of Modern Irish translations from Old and Middle Irish: Athbheo (Alive Again or...

CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL

The impact of cultural nationalism on the Insh Literary Revival is a topic of continuing interest for the cultural critic and literary historian alike. In recent years, with the Fa11 of the Berlin Wall, political scientists and others, suchas A.D. Smith, Ernest Gellner, and E.J. Hobsbawm, have also focused on the subject of nationalism. The intention here in this article is to revisit a familiar site in the light of these new ideas and to test their validity or appropriateness in the Irish context. The article, part of a larger project to be published in 2003 by Polity Press under the title A Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Irish Literature, is divided into 5 sections: What ish my Nation?; What is a Nation?; Do Nations Have Navels?; 1890s: Winds of Change; English As We Speak It In Ireland. Among Irish authors discussed are Hyde, Shaw. Yeats, Wilde, Lady Gregory, Joyce, and Beckett.