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.

• New approach to modernism, one that emphasizes a specifically Irish modernism with an anthropological character • Interdisciplinary approach, with full consideration of British anthropology and ethnography in late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries • Extensive close analysis of key texts by major Revivalist figures

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 from 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’; Bibliography.

‘… a valuable contribution to a vast field of study … Castle’s textual analyses are always insightful.’ Irish Studies Review