Modernism and the Celtic Revival

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.

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. The Celtic muse: anthropology, modernism and the Celtic Revival; 2. 'Fair equivalents': Yeats, Revivalism and the redemption of culture; 3. 'Synge-On-Aran': The Aran Islands and the subject of Revivalist ethnography; 4. Staging ethnography: Synge's The Playboy of the Western World; 5. 'A renegade in the ranks': Joyce's critique of Revivalism in the early fiction; 6. Joyce's modernism: anthropological fictions in Ulysses; Conclusion. After the Revival: 'Not even Main Street is safe'; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

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.

Gregory Castle is Associate Professor of British and Irish Literature at Arizona State University.