The Materialist-Fabulist Dialectic

2020 ◽  
pp. 132-150
Author(s):  
Gregory Dobbins
Keyword(s):  
Social Realism ◽  
Folk Beliefs ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Modern Fiction ◽  
Irish Literary Revival ◽  
James Stephens

This chapter examines the contrasting uses of folktale, fantasy, realism, and satire in the works of James Stephens and Eimar O’Duffy, two key fabulist authors of the Irish Literary Revival. The rendering of ancient mythological material and folk beliefs into modern fiction constitutes a distinct sub-strand of fiction of the Revival era. Running counter to this appeal to ancient forms in many instances was a resort to modes of irony, parody, and social realism to comment upon the disparity between romantic ideals and material realities in pre- and post-independence Ireland. In their most aesthetically successful works, Stephens and O’Duffy draw liberally from each of these trajectories in a manner that changes the fundamental meaning of each by providing a new and different manner of representing politics.

UNNAMING THE SUBJECT: Samuel Beckett and Colonial Alterity

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Quigley
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Irish Literary Revival

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.

Strangers in the house: reconfiguring the borders of national and cultural identities in contemporary Irish theatre

2001 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN SINGLETON
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Future Health ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Dramatic Writing ◽  
Irish Literary Revival

The Irish literary revival at the beginning of the last century established the concept of ‘house’ as a symbol of ‘nation’ in dramatic writing. Strangers to the house thus took on the mantle of imperialist forces whose colonial project, practices and values had to be resisted and expelled. The allegorical situations of houses and strangers in theatre foreshadowed revolution and eventual independence for the country decades later. Contemporary Irish playwrights continue to use the house/stranger, familiar/foreign dichotomies as templates for their exploration of the current state of the ‘nation’, but they are also beginning to explore the idea that ‘strangeness’ might be a condition that should be embraced to ensure the future health of that nation.

Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print

Béaloideas ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Maureen Murphy ◽  
Yug Mohit Chaudhry
Keyword(s):  
Literary Revival ◽  
Irish Literary Revival

scholarly journals Bax and the ‘Celtic North’

2013 ◽  
pp. 51-87
Author(s):  
Aidan J. Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The South ◽  
Musical Engagement ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Irish Literary Revival ◽  
Celtic Mythology ◽  
Western Ireland ◽  
Arnold Bax ◽  
North Western

Scholars of Arnold Bax have long acknowledged the influence of the Irish Literary Revival on the composer’s compositional output up to about 1920, of Sibelius from the late 1920s onwards, and of the continuity of styles between these two periods. In this article I argue that this continuity relies on what Bax draws from early Yeats, which is less Celtic mythology or folklore than a particular way of imagining nature; that Bax’s use as a compositional stimulus of what he called the ‘Celtic North’ (essentially the landscapes of western Ireland and north-western Scotland) had parallels in the literature and art of 1920s Ireland; and that the ‘Celtic North’ offers a means of critiquing inter-war English pastoralism, which has traditionally been associated with what Alun Howkins, after Hilaire Belloc, has called the ‘South Country’. Bax thus offers a musical engagement with nature that is essentially dystopian, sublime and (within the discourse of British pastoralism) non-Anglo Saxon.

Ludovico Ariosto

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Looney
Keyword(s):  
16Th Century ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Michelangelo Buonarroti ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Modern Fiction

Ludovico Ariosto (b. 1474–d. 1533), whose work links 15th-century humanism with the vernacular classicism that burgeoned later in the 16th century, is a crucial figure in the development of Italian Renaissance literary culture. An accomplished Neo-Latin poet whose earliest letter is a request for books on Platonism from the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius (1498), Ariosto used his considerable knowledge of classical Latin literature to forge a literary corpus that blends ancient literary models with medieval ones to create an impressive example of vernacular classicism. No less than his contemporary Michelangelo Buonarroti did for art, Ariosto took the literary revival of Antiquity to new heights. Accordingly, Ariosto can be seen as a forerunner of Miguel de Cervantes and other vernacular prose artists whose critical recapitulations of medieval chivalric fiction under the influence of classical works and classicizing authors like Ariosto eventually led to the birth of the novel. For modern readers who are accustomed to the conventions of modern fiction, at times Ariosto sounds strangely familiar, even postmodern.

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