Family and inheritance

The imperative after the Famine to keep the small farm from being subdivided led to the familist system under which one son, not necessarily the first-born, was to inherit; all the others had to find lives elsewhere, mostly through emigration. Poems by Bernard O’Donoghue and John Montague, a story of George Moore, and a play by T. C. Murray dramatize this situation. In other works by Murray and Eugene McCabe, the focus is on the ageing autocrat without an heir. Plays of Padraic Colum and John Murphy stage the divided impulses of staying home on the land and leaving for America. The small farm, metonym for the nation in the Revival period, becomes the battleground of the family.

Intellectual Nomads

Alongside her analysis of Cunard’s memoir of George Moore, Marcus reads her 1954 account of travel writer, Norman Douglas, within the contexts of exile, English primitivism, and the exploitation of antiquities abroad by representatives of Western culture. The chapter examines the funding of ex-Surrealist Michel Leiris and his Djibouti Expedition to collect African art and artifacts alongside Cunard’s unfunded and publicly excoriated intellectual and literary project to collect Black voices and cultures in the Negro anthology. Marcus also addresses Cunard’s problematic reading of accusations against Douglas of pedophilia and a text “torn between the desire to tell and the desire to hide the secrets” of his life and her own.

Closet Autobiography

This chapter gives a close reading of memoirs Cunard wrote about the Irish novelist, George Moore, who became a father figure for her, and novelist and travel writer, Norman Douglas. Marcus investigates Cunard’s refusal to write about her lovers, next to her published remembrances of two older homosexual eccentrics, whom she looked on as literary mentors. The chapter also provides a genre analysis of confessional writing, autobiography, biography, and memoir.

Introduction to the Original Text

Jane Marcus outlines her methodology and focus on Nancy Cunard as a poet, contextualizing Cunard’s involvement in the poetry scene with canonical figures of modernism, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Stephen Spender, and pointing to the ways in which she rejected the dominant aesthetic of her age. She also explores Cunard’s concern with whiteness through the influence of father figures, George Moore and Norman Douglas, from her childhood and young adulthood. Cunard’s engagement with Black culture, the compilation of the Negro Anthology, and her journalism devoted to anti-fascism and leftist political activism as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War and for the African American Associated Press are also considered here.

George Moore

This chapter examines the significance of George Moore’s contribution to the development of modern Irish fiction, and in particular his significance as Ireland’s first modernist novelist. It argues that Moore’s novels from early to late bring to Irish fiction not only a frank discussion of gender and desire but also present ongoing challenges to the conventions of fiction and the boundaries of genre. The discussion explains how, through his focus on gender and sexuality and a boldly experimental approach to narrative voice and structure, Moore propelled the Irish novel into the twentieth century, moving it beyond political melodrama, retellings of folklore, and the Anglo-Irish Gothic.

Revival Fiction

This chapter examines Irish realist fiction produced during the era of the Irish Revival, particularly between 1890 and 1916. It argues that realist writing by authors such as George Moore, Emily Lawless, Shan F. Bullock, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce stands in subtle but definite contrast to conventional nineteenth-century realist fiction. Writing from a distinctly naturalist perspective, these authors challenge the conventions both of realism and idealism in their representation of the past and its orientation towards the future. Rather than revive an idealized past in the name of the Irish nation, they deploy the past (as narrative, as trope, as misrecognition) as part of a critical reflection on that nation and its futurity.