Classics and Irish Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Isabelle Torrance ◽  
Donncha O’Rourke
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Irish Literary Revival ◽  
Irish Politics

This chapter provides a contextualized overview of the contents of the book Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016. Rather than summarizing each chapter in order of appearance and according to the subsections of the volume, the introduction draws alternative thematic connections across the different chapters. Strands of interpretation include: the different political implications of Irish authors identifying with Greece, Rome, or indeed Carthage; the imperial contexts of neoclassical architecture; pivotal figures such as Patrick Pearse, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney; the significance of the Irish Literary Revival and the Irish language; classical reception vs. the classical tradition as a theoretical framework; the Classics in Irish education.

Irish Literary Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Irish Literary Revival ◽  
Literary Renaissance

The Irish Literary Revival — also known as the ‘Irish Literary Renaissance’ or ‘The Celtic Twilight’ — describes a movement of increased literary and intellectual engagement in Ireland starting in the 1890s and occurring into the early twentieth century. As a literary movement, the Irish Literary Revival was deeply engaged in a renewed interest in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage as well as the growth of Irish nationalism during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Irish Literary Revival was only a part — though a significant one — of a more general national movement called the ‘Gaelic Revival’, which engaged in Irish heritage on the intellectual, athletic, linguistic, and political levels. For instance, the Literary Revival coincided with the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893, which sought to revive interest in Irish language and culture more broadly. The Irish Literary Revival is also sometimes referred to as the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival because it revitalized Irish literature not through the Irish language, but in English. In addition, many of its leading members were part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class. As a movement, the Irish Literary Revival is difficult to encapsulate, partly because of the range and reach of its various members, and also because the work that emerged from it was often experimental and widely diverse in focus, style, and genre.

Epic Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-166
Author(s):  
Sam Slote
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Irish Identity ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Irish Literary Revival

This chapter explores how James Joyce transvalues epic, the novel, and Ireland in tandem through an encyclopaedic multi-perspectivalism. Writers of the Irish Literary Revival engaged within a variety of genres but they especially privileged drama and poetry as the vehicles for a recrudescence of an authentic Irish identity. As a counter to this, Joyce’s writings implicitly and explicitly make the case that the kind of transvaluation requisite to an Irish Revival could be better accommodated through the genre of the novel, in that only the novel was sufficiently malleable and protean to encompass the heterogeneities that were often suppressed or ignored amongst various discordant factions of the Revival. This chapter shows how in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce exults in the heteroglossia afforded by the novel by making it a vehicle for a multitude of concurrent perspectives and for languages that are mixed and multiple.

J. M. Synge

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seán Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Irish Literary Revival ◽  
Key Innovations ◽  
Irish Politics ◽  
The Way

This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Allen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The islands of Ireland are shaped by their relationships with land and sea. This book is a study of the various and changing ways in which literature has drawn the coast in lines that shape the contours of cultural experience. The literary and historical study of the sea has swelled in the last decade, as has an interest in the littoral and the archipelagic. Beginning with the early works of William Butler Yeats, this book travels through the diverse hydroscapes of Irish literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, framing writers and artists from James Joyce to Anne Enright in liquid, and maritime contexts. In doing so it suggests new planetary frames through which to read literature’s relationships with the sea and its margins. With readings of contemporary writers, including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Kevin Barry, Seamus Heaney, Sinead Morrissey, and John Banville, and literary magazines, including The Bell, Atlantis, and Archipelago, this book is the first sustained study of Irish coastal literature.

Prologue

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Ashley Clements
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
History Of Anthropology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
History Of

The prologue issues a challenge to all interested in the Classics to address the questions ‘Why does Classics matter now?’ and ‘What should it hope to contribute to the vital issues of our present?’ by exploring how the Classics have always been embroiled in anthropological conversations about our place in relation to others. The aim of the book they frame, they assert, is to highlight—ultimately in positive terms—the contingency of the Classics’ most profound (and often disastrous) conceptual heritage to us. The historical story of the place of the Classical tradition and Classics in anthropology, it claims, enlivens us to the real contribution the Classics might make now beyond the history of Classical reception and enjoins direct engagement with the question of why we need Classics now. This book’s story of the history of anthropology, it argues, tells us this: we need to do it in order to think beyond it.

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