Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival

Abstract

The literature of the Irish Revival of the 1890s should be seen as a hinge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Its authors appropriated the ‘primitive’ through the lenses of comparative anthropology, mythology, and colonial travel-writing, and actively strove to re-establish contact with primitive modes through ‘the study of mythology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis’. They were engaged in a complex and volitional primitivism, which became ‘modernist’ as it utilised the findings of social science. The works of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Lady Gregory are all analysed as the product of such influences. However, this book also suggests that Celticism itself underwent a sea-change during the 19th century, recreating itself in academic circles as an anti-primitivist science known as Celtology. It was only a matter of time before Yeats and Synge, who read widely in the works of Celtology, would look to this new science to find alternatives to the primitivism of the Twilight.

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