Helen O’connell
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199286461
- eISBN:
- 9780191713361
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199286461.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, European Literature
Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil ...
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Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil aesthetic revivalism in Ireland, a project that was, in part, a response to the rationalizing ideologies of improvement modernization. For Yeats, those ideologies were literary as well as social and political in nature, achieving their most coherent expression in the 19th-century tradition of English realism. This chapter explores how Yeats's Revival was directed against those discourses of progress, counteracting realist assertions of linearity and causality with supernaturalism and ‘orality’. It is thus unsurprising that Yeats was to find himself at odds with the Young Ireland orthodoxies of the period. This chapter speculates that the Revival writings of Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and J.M. Synge were a product of the inevitable failures of both improvement discourse and Young Ireland nationalism.Less
Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil aesthetic revivalism in Ireland, a project that was, in part, a response to the rationalizing ideologies of improvement modernization. For Yeats, those ideologies were literary as well as social and political in nature, achieving their most coherent expression in the 19th-century tradition of English realism. This chapter explores how Yeats's Revival was directed against those discourses of progress, counteracting realist assertions of linearity and causality with supernaturalism and ‘orality’. It is thus unsurprising that Yeats was to find himself at odds with the Young Ireland orthodoxies of the period. This chapter speculates that the Revival writings of Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and J.M. Synge were a product of the inevitable failures of both improvement discourse and Young Ireland nationalism.
Paul Bew
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199561261
- eISBN:
- 9780191701832
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199561261.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Political History
This chapter discusses fenianism, a form of militant Irish American nationalism after the failed 1848 rebellion in Ireland. The first section of this chapter describes the attempts to combine north ...
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This chapter discusses fenianism, a form of militant Irish American nationalism after the failed 1848 rebellion in Ireland. The first section of this chapter describes the attempts to combine north and south Ireland for the public end. This development owed everything to an unusual friendship between two rather different and very remarkable men, Charles Gavan Duffy and Dr. James McKnight. The second section looks at the rebirth of the Irish revolutionary tradition. Fenianism, as the new movement came to be called, linked the concerns and passions of patriotic young men in the homeland with the Irish-born of America and of England and Scotland. The third section examines the transition of fenianism from military elitism to popular politics. The fourth section reports on Isaac Butt, and the case for home rule.Less
This chapter discusses fenianism, a form of militant Irish American nationalism after the failed 1848 rebellion in Ireland. The first section of this chapter describes the attempts to combine north and south Ireland for the public end. This development owed everything to an unusual friendship between two rather different and very remarkable men, Charles Gavan Duffy and Dr. James McKnight. The second section looks at the rebirth of the Irish revolutionary tradition. Fenianism, as the new movement came to be called, linked the concerns and passions of patriotic young men in the homeland with the Irish-born of America and of England and Scotland. The third section examines the transition of fenianism from military elitism to popular politics. The fourth section reports on Isaac Butt, and the case for home rule.
