Modernism and the Celtic Revival

Abstract

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.

Irish Revivalism: Critical Trends and New Directions

“…As part of this critical trend, the ideological and political investments of Literary Revivalists, their knowledge of anthropology and theories of culture – their ‘commitment to the “revival” of the primitive’ (Mattar 19) – have come under close scrutiny. In Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001), I argue that despite this knowledge and the cultural legitimacy it conferred upon them, Anglo‐Irish Revivalists resisted the impulse to turn Ireland into a laboratory for imperialist anthropology and ethnology. Indeed, their ethnographic imagination was a signature component of their aesthetic and provided a critical purchase on modernity.…”

Angles on Aran: constructing connection in the work of J.M. Synge, Robert Flaherty and Sean Scully

“…But this account is destabilised in ways that suggest a modernist sensibility at odds with the mode of ethnographic redemption that has been called into being as an anodyne for his sense of dissociation and alienation. 33 The ambivalent position of the modern, Anglo-Irish exile in relation to Irish authenticity generates both an academic (Celticist) fascination with the Other, and also a powerful, emotional desire to belong. Synge was acutely aware of his outsider status, and some of this is revealed in his preface to Playboy of the Western World (1907) where he describes having spent time while on the Aran Islands listening through a chink in the floorboards to the 'beautiful phrases' of the servant girls in the kitchen below.…”

Towards a Critical Reappraisal of Kate O'Brien's The Flower of May

“…But you-"' 17 In Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle writes that James Joyce, while sharing 'the same sense of being both inside and outside culture' as Yeats and Synge, sought to redefine rather than revive Irish culture in his writing. 18 Likewise, O'Brien, who shared a similar remove to Joyce from the rural Irish, sought to interrogate the cultural milieu, particularly the middle classes. The revival theme is especially prominent in The Land of Spices.…”

“…and in the Dublin cattle-markets and across the fat acres of Kildare and Meath they made fine fortunes' (pp. [18][19]. 20 The unflattering portrayal of this family suggests that the landed gentry serve as an antithesis to the Irish middle classes of the nineteen fifties, who differ from O'Brien's own middle-class milieu.…”