The Cambridge companion to Irish modernism

Abstract

The "Irish Revival" and "modernism" are an unlikely pairing.For the major critics of modernism in the mid-century, like Richard Ellmann or Hugh Kenner, the Irish modernists were modern insofar as they transcended their national background.Whereas the towering Irish modernists, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, took their lead from international, cosmopolitan, and generally metropolitan artistic currents, the revivalists were, in this view, nationalist, valorizing a rural and premodern Ireland swathed in cultural purity and twilit nostalgia.The opposition, often calcifying into reductive duality between Joyce the pioneering modernist and W. B. Yeats the belated Romantic, was buttressed variously by antipathy to the Revival by major modernist i gures including Joyce himself, Beckett and Ezra Pound, and by the humanist universalizing approach of American criticism in the aftermath of World War II.What could be less "modernist" than that v ö lkisch and insular movement against which many subsequent Irish writers, realist and experimental, set their teeth and often aimed their scorn?What is less "revivalist" than the deracinated Parisian bohemians, cocking a snoop at the provincial, confessional, conservative backwater that they had been so eager to escape? 1 In the current critical climate, however, the two concepts have switched their polar charge from repulsion to attraction.The "Revival," far from the opposite of "modernism," is now typically regarded as an incubatory moment of it, its anti-modern ideology of a piece with the modernist disdain for bourgeois values and prefabricated realist forms."What 'British' modernism there was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" asserts Terry Eagleton, "was largely of Irish origin." 2 What shifts in critical perspective allowed such a turnaround?How and why does the cleavage between Irish Revival and modernism now emphasize the joints rather than the divisions?

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