‘Master-pieces of their kind’

This chapter discusses the compositions of the blind seventeenth- and eighteenth-century harper-composer Turlough Carolan (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin) and the manner in which they were employed during the Celtic Revival by eighteenth-century Irish antiquarians and scholars in their recovery of the Gaelic past. Motivated by an interest in the native music and song of Ireland that was in turn sparked by the romantic movement, the vogue for primitivism, and the cult of the bard, scholars such as Joseph Cooper Walker, Charlotte Brooke, and James Hardiman re-invented Carolan’s image as that of a bard and a musical genius and elevated his compositions to a higher status than they had achieved during his lifetime. In doing so, they brought his work to a wider English-speaking audience.

Britain and Ireland: Decadence beyond London

British decadence has long been identified with London, the home of theaters and publishing houses. Most decadent writers lived and worked in the city, setting many of the great works of British decadence in its streets and squares. Yet decadence, as a literary style and a cultural concept, reached all parts of the United Kingdom, and in the process changed the nature of this literary tradition. Moving from Cornwall and Wales to the north of Ireland and Scotland, this essay charts a British decadence with close ties to the Celtic Revival, one that embraces nature and that looks to a future beyond the autumn of decline. From writers vacationing in the west of Britain, to the Ulster literary revival, to the embrace of natural cycles as an antidote to metropolitan ennui in Scotland, the writing examined here demonstrates the variety of forms that British decadence could take.

Introduction

The introduction to this book begins by illustrating that many writers and critics in the 1890s identified an artistic and literary revival in fin-de-siècle Scotland, one that hoped to defend Scottish cultural traditions and revive Scotland’s status as an international cultural centre. Despite these statements, the period has come to be associated with insularity, anti-nationalism and sentimentality, especially in Scottish literary criticism. The introduction establishes the book’s aim: to uncover the concerns with cultural revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, before going on to set up the key contexts and parameters for the book. Building on John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism, I define my terms and then introduce key political contexts, highlighting that cultural revival efforts ran alongside (and intersected with) a prominent late-Victorian political campaign to establish a Scottish Parliament. I then introduce the key artistic movements that helped support fin-de-siècle cultural revivalism – decadence and symbolism – and I discuss the ways in which they complemented the Celtic Revival.

Seumas O’Sullivan and Revivalist Nature Poetry

The Irish Revival was, amongst other things, an attempt to ‘re-enchant’ the Irish natural world as both a protest against Anglicisation and Enlightenment values. Through a study of the poetry of a lesser-known Revivalist poet, Seumas O’Sullivan, who was a keen natural historian, and thus engaged with the popular discourses and practices of natural science in the period, this chapter discusses Revivalist nature poetry as a form of ‘re-enchantment’. In doing so, it also considers how engagement with natural history in the period effected a shift in the poetic relationship to materiality, considering the movement between Celtic Revival poetry and later Revivalist work in term of a closer attention to the physical world.

THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN GREAT BRITAIN (MID-XVIII - EARLY XX CENTURIES): IDENTITY AND MEMORY

The article is devoted to the Celtic revival, a movement related to the cultural development of the British Isles and the construction of their regional identities on the basis of the ancient past. The author carries out a comparative analysis of this process on the example of the inhabitants of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, revealing the features of their self-identification in the middle of the XVIII - early XX centuries. The article attempts to identify the reasons for the beginning of the Celtic revival and establish its exact chronological framework. The author comes to the conclusion that the residents of Scotland and Wales sought to become full-fledged members of the "British Commonwealth" and take a worthy place in it. The revival of images of the Celtic past in the memory of the peoples of these regions was focused on the preservation of identity, while in Ireland - on the struggle for independence, and in England - on the glorification and protection of imperialism.

‘Print is Much Safer than MS’: The Fate of Folklore and Folk Song Collections in the Isle of Man

The Isle of Man in the 1890s saw remarkable activity in the collecting of folklore and folk song, both in English and Manx Gaelic. This was followed by a further wave of collectors in the next decade, enthused by the Celtic Revival. Much of the material collected has now been lost for a variety of reasons detailed in this article. The most significant loss was that of the cylinder recordings made by the Manx Language Society between 1905 and 1913. Several collectors expressed concern in their lifetime about the survival of their papers, but this did little to prevent the loss of the collections they amassed. Such a fragmented record has consequences in researching what does now survive.

Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen

Most late-Victorian little magazines were published from London, but elsewhere in Britain relevant journals were also produced, often functioning as the periodical organs of localised organisations that wanted to engage with the local communities in which they operated. The Arts & Crafts journal the Quest (1894–96), issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, ‘resisted any structural differentiation between the worlds of production and consumption, preferring the unified ideal of a community of producers meeting common needs through mutual cooperation’. Outside of England, writers of the budding Celtic Revival wrote for several little magazines, but few notable little magazines were set up before the early twentieth century. One notable exception was the Edinburgh-based Evergreen (1895–96), perhaps the late Victorian era’s best example of a conceptually integrated periodical, this time not only inspired by a local variant of the collaborative spirit characterising the Arts and Crafts journals, but also meant to exemplify an advocated ‘organic’ unity for the city where its producers lived and worked, and from there for Scotland and ‘North Britain’ at large.

Od Turgieniewa do Moore’a — rola literatury rosyjskiej w ideologii Ligi Gaelickiej

The paper scrutinizes George Moore’s fascination with Ivan Turgenev’s literary output, which led the Irish novelist into writing his first collection of short stories. Interestingly, the abundance of influences resulted in George Moore being one of the few Irish writers, who, throughout his writing career, went from the state of eager interest in the Celtic Revival to the bitter criticism of the Gaelic League, visible in his autobiographical accounts. Interestingly, his collection of short stories The Untilled field (1903) well illustrates this process. Initially written in order to be used by the members of the Gaelic League as a text for translation into Irish, and therefore as a medium of dissemination of the native language among Irish people, later became a source of influence for James Joyce’s Dubliners. Therefore, the following paper aims to investigate the case of George Moore’s The Untilled field as a literary and cultural phenomenon. The reference to Ivan Turgenev’s A sportsman’s sketches (1852) is to be scrutinized. What is more, the paper investigates how the initial interest in the idea of a „Dublin Turgenev” did not end on this particular project but had a greater impact on Moore’s literary career.