In Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle examines the impact of anthropology on the work of Irish Revivalists such as W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge and James Joyce. Castle argues that anthropology enabled Irish Revivalists to confront and combat British imperialism, even as these Irish writers remained ambivalently dependent on the cultural and political discourses they sought to undermine. Castle shows how Irish Modernists employed textual and rhetorical strategies first developed in anthropology to translate, reassemble and edit oral and folk-cultural material. In doing so, he claims, they confronted and undermined inherited notions of identity which Ireland, often a site of ethnographic curiosity throughout the nineteenth-century, had been subject to. Drawing on a wide range of post-colonial theory, this book should be of interest to scholars in Irish studies, post-colonial studies and Modernism.
In recent years, Bildung and the Bildungsroman genre have attracted considerable attention, especially in modernist and postcolonial studies, which have re-evaluated the former’s conceptual relevance and the latter’s formal efficacy. In postcolonial fiction, the fissure, or contradiction, in classical Bildung and modernity itself becomes the source of new forms of identity and community. Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet explores alternative means of achieving cultural and aesthetic wholeness through new modes of auto/biographical writing. In her nonlinear, polyvocal, and syncopated narratives, we find instead alternatives to conventional Bildung that are more adaptable to non-Western modes of social belonging.
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