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.

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. Castle shows how Irish Modernists employed textual and rhetorical strategies first developed in anthropology to translate, reassemble, and edit oral and folk-cultural material. Drawing on a wide range of postcolonial theory, this book should be of interest to scholars in Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and Modernism.

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. Castle shows how Irish Modernists employed textual and rhetorical strategies first developed in anthropology to translate, reassemble, and edit oral and folk-cultural material. Drawing on a wide range of postcolonial theory, this book should be of interest to scholars in Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and Modernism.

Despite distance and differences in culture, the early twentieth century was a time of literary cross-pollination between Ireland and Japan. Notably, the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats had a powerful influence on Japanese letters, at the same time that contemporary and classical Japanese literature and theatre impacted Yeats’s own literary experiments. Citing an extraordinary range of Japanese and Irish texts, Aoife Hart argues that Japanese translations of Irish Gaelic folklore and their subsequent reception back in Ireland created collisions, erasures, and confusions in the interpretations of literary works. Assessing the crucial roles of translation and transnationalism in cross-cultural exchanges between the Celtic Revival and Japanese writers of the modern period, Hart proves that interlingual dialogue and folklore have the power to reconstruct a culture’s sense of heritage. Rejecting the notion that the Celtic Revival was inward and parochial, Hart suggests that, seeking to protect their heritage from the forces of globalization, the Irish adapted their understanding of heritage to one that exists within the transnational contexts of modernity – a heritage that is locally produced but internationally circulated. In doing so, Hart maintains that the cultural contact and translation between the East and West traveled in more than one direction: it was a dialogue presenting modernity’s struggles with cosmopolitanism, gender, ethnic identity, and transnationalism. An inspired exploration of transpacific literary criticism, Yeats scholarship, and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Ancestral Recall tracks the interplay of complex ideas across languages and discourses.

Celtic modernism had a complex history with classical reception. In this book, Gregory Baker examines the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to show how new forms of modernist literary expression emerged as the evolution of classical education, the insurgent power of cultural nationalisms and the desire for transformative modes of artistic invention converged across Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Writers on the 'Celtic fringe' sometimes confronted, and sometimes consciously advanced, crudely ideological manipulations of the inherited past. But even as they did so, their eccentric ways of using the classics and its residual cultural authority animated new decentered idioms of English - literary vernaculars so fragmented and inflected by polyglot intrusion that they expanded the range of Anglophone literature and left in their wake compelling stories for a new age.

Yeats, Revivalism, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats's revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relation between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats's revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.

This book scrutinizes the way modern Irish writers exploited or surrendered to primitivism, and how primitivism functions as an idealized nostalgia for the past as a potential representation of difference and connection.