"An excellent collection of essays….Highly engaging, provocative, yet lucidly argued and tremendously enjoyable."—Caoimhín DeBarra, Gonzaga University
"The depth and range of essays make newly clear the Revival’s complexity and diversity, tracing not only its history of innovation but also its productive counter-histories, illuminating alliances and affiliations, conflicts and divisions, radical achievements and their unfulfilled potential."—Margaret Kelleher, Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin
"In every case, the essays in this volume provide insightful, discrete analyses of the topics they explore. Each reflects the interpretive skill and scholarly insights that one finds in the most useful examinations of diverse aspects of Irish studies."—Michael Patrick Gillespie, Irish Literary Supplement
Description
The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast, The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by interpreting the Revival through the concept of “complexity,” a theory recently developed in the information and biological sciences.
Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival’s various components operated as parts of a network but without any overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival’s elements can be seen as having come together under the heading of a single objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity, political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the Revival’s individual parts involved conflict and cooperation, difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Complex Revival
Joseph Valente and Marjorie Howes
Part One. The Revivalist Symbolic: Recovery and Remediation
1. The Celtic Literary Society: A Political and Secular Gaelic League?
Brian Ó Conchubhair
2. Revival, Remediation, and the Irish Media Habitus
Gregory Castle
Part Two. Revivalism in Print: At Home and Abroad
3. Yeats, Gregory, and the Revival’s Print Cultures
Marjorie Howes
4. Ourselves (Transnationally) Alone: Globalism and Nationalist Journalism during the Revival
Karen Steele
Part Three. The Revivalism of Everyday Life: Novel Forms
5. School Stories
George Moore, Realism, and Revival
Mary L. Mullen
6. An Ordinary Revival: Yeats and Irish Women Novelists
Paige Reynolds
Part Four. Revivals of Spirit
7. “The Politics of Time and Eternity”: A. E., Theosophy, and the Temporality of Emergence
Gregory Dobbins
8. An Arts and Crafts Revival: Harry Clarke’s Modernist Gaze
Kelly Sullivan
Part Five. Engendering Revivalism: Insight and Insurgency
9. Reviving the New Woman: Feminists, Revolutionaries, and Writers
Tina O’Toole
10. “All the Green World Is on Our Side”: Radical Suffragism and Ecofeminism in the Writings of Eva Gore-Booth
Anne Fogarty
Part Six. The Biopolitics of the Revival: Toward the Easter Rising
11. Nursing the Revival: Patrick Pearse, Breastfeeding, and Sacrifice
Abby Bender
12. Death before Disability: The Bioaesthetics of Blood Sacrifice
Joseph Valente
About the Author
Joseph Valente is UB Distinguished Professor of English and Disability Studies at the University of Buffalo. He has authored and coedited many books in Irish studies, including The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922.
Marjorie Howes is associate professor at Boston College. She is the author of Yeats’s Nation: Gender, Class, and Irishness, winner of the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Best Book on Language and Culture and Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History.
Related Interest
June 2023