Irish Revivalism

Sinead Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival (Oxford... 

Karen Steele, Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival (Syracuse University Press, 2007), pp. 72-80. 

D. P. Moran, The Gaelic Revival , The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin James Duffy, 1905), p- 83. 

Part of the reason for this has to do with the ambiguous relation the Revival had to modernism in the first place. Irish modernism, after all, emerged partly in response to the conventions of the Revival. In a sophisticated theoretical assessment of the singular characteristics of Irish modernism, Joe Cleary concedes the apparently archaic character of the Revival in respect to a more international understanding of modernism ... 

In Synge s case, a coimection to Irish modernism, a loosely defined tendency linked by a commitment to forms of cultural production distinct from those of the Revival, depends not so much upon the fact that his work demonstrates the conventions of that moment in literary history but rather on the values he attached to those conventions. Joep Leerssen, who regards Synge as the great forerunner of Joyce in the history of Irish modernism, argues that Synge made use of the trope of tradition in his writing but did so for radically different purposes than other writers identified with the Revival. While Yeats and company celebrated the resurrection or rebirth of the elements of... 

All this provided the context for the premiere of The Playboy of the Western World on 2.6 January 1907, the most famous single event in the history of Irish theatre. That night has been subjected to repeated analysis focused on the performance, the audience, and the social and political motives for the violent response to the play with the riots that followed in the week of its run. Reviewers of virtually any latter-day theatrical revival feel obHged to refer back to its stormy opening. The play has come to be defined by, inseparable from, the reaction against it. What were the issues and what was the immediate background ... 

Just as Bunting s poetry shows there need be no contradiction between local allegiances and transnational awareness, the ambition to unite the regional and the continental was also characteristic of the writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance - a movement coterminous with high modernism, but not often read alongside it. Like more widely known political modernisms such as the Irish Literary Revival and, across the Atlantic, the Harlem Renaissance, the Scottish Renaissance took as its premise that cultural regeneration is the necessary precursor to political regeneration. 

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