Modernism and the Celtic Revival

by Gregory Castle

• ISBN13: 9780521793193
• ISBN10: 052179319X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-21
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
List of abbreviations	viii
The Celtic muse: anthropology, modernism, and the Celtic Revival	1	(39)
``Fair equivalents'': Yeats, Revivalism, and the redemption of culture	40	(58)
``Synge-On-Aran'': The Aran Islands and the subject of Revivalist ethnography	98	(36)
Staging ethnography: Synge's The Playboy of the Western World	134	(38)
``A renegade from the ranks'': Joyce's critique of Revivalism in the early fiction	172	(36)
Joyce's modernism: anthropological fictions in Ulysses	208	(40)
Conclusion. After the Revival: ``Not even Main Street is Safe''	248	(13)
Notes	261	(31)
Select bibliography	292	(14)
Index	306