literary revival

literary revival, a term used to describe the modern Irish literary movement, lasting from around 1890 and the fall of Parnell to about 1922, a date marking the end of the Anglo-Irish War and the publication of Ulysses. As a movement it originated in the earlier cultural developments of the 19th cent.: the antiquarian studies of Sylvester O'Halloran and Charlotte Brooke culminating in the work of the Ordnance Survey co-ordinated by George Petrie; and the idealistic popular balladry and fiction of the Young Ireland movement expressed in the columns of The Nation. In the early 1890s it seemed to W. B. Yeats that the time was right for a new cultural movement in Irish society which would replace the political one for Home Rule [see Irish Parliamentary Party]. He immersed himself in Irish legend and folklore, and set about enthusing others. His Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) represented months of hard work, in which he was assisted by Douglas Hyde, whose Beside the Fire (1890), an anthology of tales with facing translations, is the first authentic collection of folklore in Irish. In 1892 Yeats, T. W. Rolleston, and Charles Gavan Duffy set up the Irish Literary Society in London; in Dublin Yeats founded the National Literary Society in the same year, with Hyde as first President. This cultural activity was carried forward by the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893, with Hyde again becoming its first President. Also in that year appeared his The Love Songs of Connacht. In the 1890s the new Irish writings of Yeats and others found ready acceptance among British readers, who were attracted to a culture not yet entirely modernized. In a world growing increasingly industrialized, the Celts and other so-called primitive peoples were thought to possess an instinctive understanding and knowledge, qualities reflected in Yeats's The Celtic Twilight (1893, 2nd edn. 1902), which grew out of his recollections of Sligo and Howth and showed his respect for the intuitions of Irish country people. A formative book, it gave the movement a popular name. A desire to return to ancient truth is revealed in the title of George Russell's Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894). Yeats met Edward Martyn, George Moore, Lady Gregory, and Synge in the 1890s and these friendships formed a dynamic set of relationships that determined the course of the revival for the next ten years or more and led to the founding of the Abbey Theatre. Research into Gaelic language and literature, after a period of relative inactivity in the 1870s and 1880s, began to revive, in particular with Standish Hayes O'Grady's Silva Gadelica (1892), a large anthology of stories from the various branches of classic Irish narrative (see tale-types). George Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897), an anthology of translated Irish verse from the earliest times, proclaimed the antiquity of Irish poetry. The Gaelic League sponsored editions of Irish writings, notably Aodhagán Ó Rathaille and Eoghan Rua Ó Suilleabháin. Patrick Pearse became editor of the Gaelic League weekly An Claidheamh Soluis, 1903-9, and argued for a modern literature in Irish. Cú Chulainn, the dominant fictional figure of the revival, and the embodiment of the heroic nationalism celebrated and criticized in many of its writings, was the subject of the second volume of Standish James O'Grady's History of Ireland: Cuculain and his Contemporaries (1880) and of his novel The Coming of Cuculain (1895). Cú Chulainn entered Yeats's own poetry in 1892 with ‘Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea’. However, the stories of the Ulster and other cycles of Irish literature seemed to Yeats to be ‘a wild anarchy of legends’, so that when he and Lady Gregory joined forces she undertook to shape the Cú Chulainn stories into the coherent narrative of Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902). Yeats drew upon this work for his Cuchulain cycle of plays; and the hero was also a powerful symbol for Patrick Pearse. The union of aristocrat and peasant which Yeats and Lady Gregory tried to realize left out the Catholic middle classes, who became more vocal as the 20th cent. progressed. Catholic and Gaelic nationalism had a spokesman in D. P. Moran, the editor of The Leader (founded 1900), which tended to regard the revival as a dalliance of the remnants of an outmoded Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) was received as an insult. Joyce stood aside from the revival, his hero Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) escaping the nets of nationalism, family, and religion. At the Abbey Theatre the management were frequently in disagreement with the actors, who regularly expressed views favouring a more overtly nationalist policy. The Easter Rising (1916) had amongst its leaders writers who had been influenced by cultural nationalism, but who were ready to act out in reality some of its images. Yeats was later to ask, ‘Did that play of mine send out | Certain men the English shot?’, referring to Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), a play which had Maud Gonne in the title-role, embodying nationalist intensity. With Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Yeats's ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (published 1922) the revival draws to a close. Against nationalist fixity Joyce sets the broad humanity of Leopold Bloom, Jew, citizen of the world, and good man; and Stephen Dedalus, the artist. Yeat's poem, written in the aftermath of the Rising and in the midst of the Anglo-Irish War, declares that ‘no work can stand’. The revival helped to create an image of a pastoral, mythic, unmodernized Ireland that influenced subsequent writers and artists. Some, like Austin Clarke and F. R. Higgins, continued to exploit the image of an idealized west in poems and novels based on folklore and myth. Others openly mocked the ethos of the revival, as in Samuel Beckett's dismissal of it as ‘Cuchulainoid’. In the 1980s Field Day reopened the issues of the revival, sometimes calling for the abandonment of its myths, but more often questioning its premisses to test their value for late 20th-cent. Irish society.

Bibliography

George J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival (1979).