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This chapter examines the cultural-political allegiances from the centenary of the 1798 rising to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society. During 1899-1901, the Irish Literary Theatre led by W. B. Yeats, Edward Martyn, and George Moore lived out its influential span. Tracking political circumstances, it is argued that while the ILT began life in debt to the constructive Unionism of Horace Plunkett and the Daily Express, the polarising influence of the Boer War took it into more nationalist territory. Although publications such as Moran's the Leader kept sectarian fires lit, the influence of socialist thinkers Connolly and Ryan on Arthur Griffith mitigated the United Irishman's nationalist conservatism (and anti-Semitism) long enough for an embrace of the theatre movement. This seemed confirmed when the ILT collapsed, to be followed by the INTS in 1902 and its fabled production of Cathleen ni Houlihan.

Chapter 4 offers an examination of the domestic and international political circumstances surrounding the story. These include the contemporary debate over the Wyndham (Land) Act and the Dublin visit of King Edward VII, and Arthur Griffith's radical nationalist critique of the imperial political theater featuring the Gordon Bennett Cup Race and the royal visit in July 1903. Through the figure of the Hungarian Villona, Joyce clearly summons an allegorical reference to the devolutionary strategy of Griffith's Resurrection of Hungary. The relationship of the story to Halford Mackinder's influential essay, “The Pivot of History,” Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), and the Englishman Routh's proposal to end the evening with “one great game” connects the action with the Great Game for global dominance.

Chapter 1 charts the currents of thought on Ireland’s place in the world among the revolutionary generation of Sinn Féin members and other nationalist groups which dreamt of Irish independence. It follows these developments from Fenian and IRB efforts in the nineteenth century to involve Britain’s European rivals in Ireland, to the early twentieth-century ideas of the Sinn Féin founder, Arthur Griffith, on internationalism and an embryonic Irish approach to foreign affairs, through to advanced nationalist thinking during the First World War on how to benefit from the realignment of European politics that would follow the war. It also examines the influence of the diaspora and contact with other subject peoples in Europe and the British Empire.

Chapter 3 tells the story of P.S. O’Hegarty’s life and his complex and contradictory reflections on the Irish revolution, most notably through his 1924 book, The Victory of Sinn Fein. In contrast to existing interpretations of O’Hegarty as a utilitarian or a pacifist, this chapter frames O’Hegarty’s critique of the revolution as a consequence of his working-class Christian Brothers background in Cork, his activist life in Irish Separatist circles in London, and his long-standing interest in European history, literature, philosophy, and science. A polyglot and omnivorous reader, O’Hegarty’s angle for viewing the revolution—both future and past—was always wide and multivalent. Although a staunch separatist, his preoccupations in interpreting the revolution were in many ways thoroughly European. Like his continental counterparts, O’Hegarty was an intellectual grappling with the meaning and role of nationalism in a world convulsed by democracy, socialism, technology, world war, and modernity.

This book closes with a critical assessment of the Dublin nationalist press in mid-nineteenth century Ireland. It discusses the challenges that faced the political activists, the concept of the unity of class and creed, the ideological battles between constitutional nationalism and revolutionary nationalism, the creation of a new national identity, and the emergence of socialist nationalism and cultural nationalism. All of this was to impact later on a changing world in the decades around the turn of the century; particularly borne in mind are the journalists whose words and actions were to inspire leading nationalists, notably Arthur Griffith, James Connolly and Patrick Pearse. Despite the overwhelming opposition of the British government, a persistent drive to achieve some form of Irish independence did not cease, and it is argued that the Dublin mid-nineteenth century newspapers and their writers took a leading role in laying the foundations to make this happen.