IV.

Irish Revival: 1800 to 1949

Following the unsuccessful Irish Catholic rebellion of 1798, the Irish Parliament was dissolved, and the Act of Union, which took effect in 1801, made Ireland part of the United Kingdom. Nationalist movements and conflicts with Britain dominated Irish history thereafter. In 1829 Catholics gained full political rights, but campaigns to repeal the Act of Union failed. From 1845 to 1849, a blight destroyed Ireland’s potato crop, the principal food source of the people. As a result of starvation and emigration during this period, Ireland’s population fell by 20 percent. Agitation for land reform became widespread in Ireland after the potato famine, as did agitation for Irish rule.

The Gaelic language largely fell into disuse during the 19th century; Britain’s introduction in 1831 of schools that taught in English further eroded its use. With fewer and fewer people able to read and write in Irish, literature in the language was preserved primarily in oral tradition or in manuscript form. Not until a revival of Gaelic in the 20th century was publication of this literature undertaken. An example of poetry preserved in this way is Anthony Raftery’s folk history of Ireland.

A.

Recovery of the Irish Past

Poetry continued to preserve the national spirit of Ireland. Irish poet Thomas Moore set his poems to traditional Irish airs in his Irish Melodies, which were published from 1808 to 1834. These poems, which include “The Last Rose of Summer,” helped transform the idiom of one culture into that of another, according to 20th-century novelist and critic Seamus Deane. Poet and essayist Thomas Davis, along with two other writers, founded The Nation in 1842. This weekly paper, which published both literary works and political commentary, is credited with creating a national consciousness. Other notable figures from before the famine included the poets and translators James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson, whose works made Irish literature available in English translation. The work of Moore, Mangan, Ferguson, and Davis planted the seeds for a new Irish poetry that sprang up in the middle of the 19th century to celebrate the glories of Ireland’s past.

Most 19th-century Irish fiction from before the famine was written to explain the Irish to the English or to amuse readers outside Ireland who were interested in regional literature. Castle Rackrent (1800) is an indictment of irresponsible Anglo-Irish landlords written by Maria Edgeworth, an English-born woman who lived in Ireland. This novel and others by Edgeworth offer a realistic portrayal of Irish peasant life at the time, tempered with understanding and humor. The Wild Irish Girl (1806), a novel of manners by Anglo-Irish Lady Morgan, was sympathetic to the Catholic political cause. William Carleton’s collection, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830), captured Irish rural life shortly before the famine, while his novels The Black Prophet (1847), The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848), and The Tithe Proctor (1849), depicted the suffering it produced.

After the famine, the most significant Irish fiction focused on land. The popular nationalist novel Knocknagow, or the Homes of Tipperary (1879) by Charles Kickham attacked landlords’ victimization of tenant farmers, who were barely able to feed themselves after satisfying their landlords and who wore out the soil in the process. Emily Lawless countered with Hurrish (1886), a novel that criticized the violence of Irish farmers directed against Protestant landowners. Edith Somerville and Violet Martin were cousins who wrote under the pen names of Somerville and Ross. They focused on the last days of the landlord system in County Cork in the novel The Real Charlotte (1894) and in two well-known collections of humorous stories, Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1900, 1908), in which an Englishman who is appointed resident magistrate reflects upon Irish country life.

B.

Irish Renaissance

By the late 19th century the Irish had lost faith in political solutions to Ireland’s problems and turned to cultural nationalism instead. In 1893 Eoin Mac Neill and Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League to restore Irish as the spoken language of the country; the organization eventually became the driving force for the assertion of Irish identity. The search for Ireland’s lost Gaelic heritage ushered in a period known as the Irish Renaissance in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. The Irish Renaissance was spearheaded by the energy of its major figures: writers William Butler Yeats, Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge. Its intention was to find the sources for a new Irish literature in the Irish countryside and in Irish myth.

An Irish National Literary Society was founded in Dublin in 1892. It held lectures on the Celtic tradition in an effort to spark public interest in a revival. The first signs of the Irish and Anglo-Irish traditions coming together occurred in 1893. That year Douglas Hyde, who wrote in both Gaelic and English, brought out The Love Songs of Connacht (1893), English translations of Irish folk poetry whose beauty would have an enormous effect on Yeats, Gregory, and Synge. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight, also published in 1893, collected his articles on Irish legends, many of which discussed the sídh, or Celtic otherworld, inhabited by faeries and other magical beings.

Drama, however, was the literary form that best captured the ideals of the Irish Renaissance and established Ireland's literary reputation. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and playwright Edward Martyn published their Irish Literary Theatre manifesto in 1899, promising to create a national theatre for Ireland. The Irish Literary Theatre, which opened that year, was succeeded in 1902 by the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1904 the Society opened the Abbey Theatre, whose purpose was to present Irish plays about Irish subjects. The plays it produced dramatized Irish myth and history and portrayed Irish peasant life realistically.

In its first year the Irish Literary Theatre produced Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Martyn’s realistic drama The Heather Field. The Countess Cathleen aroused controversy, especially among Catholics, because its heroine sells her soul to feed her starving tenants during a famine. One of the theatre’s biggest successes was Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902), produced in the theatre’s fourth season. Now accepted as written by both Lady Gregory and Yeats but originally attributed to Yeats alone, Cathleen ní Houlihan dramatized a myth of blood sacrifice that transforms a poor old woman, a symbol of Ireland, into a young girl. That same year Lady Gregory’s translation of the Ulster Cycle’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) provided writers of the Irish Renaissance with access to material from that saga. Lady Gregory's other nationalist play, The Rising of the Moon (1907); her comedies Spreading the News (1904) and The Workhouse Ward (1908); and her tragedy The Gaol Gate (1906) also enjoyed success at the Abbey.

Synge had met Yeats in Paris in the late 1890s, and Yeats had urged him to go to the Gaelic-speaking Aran Islands off Ireland’s northwest coast, where he could study the Irish language and observe the ways of the people. The knowledge Synge gained by following this advice informed his later work. In 1903 the Irish National Theatre Society staged Synge’s comedy In the Shadow of the Glen (1903). In the play an Irishman fakes his own death in order to catch his young wife making marriage plans with a tramp who urges her to take to the roads with him. The play was construed as an attack on Irish women and was poorly received at the time.

Another Synge comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, opened at the Abbey in 1907 and also stirred controversy. It told of a young man who becomes a hero in a small Irish town when he claims to have killed his father. At a time when the Irish people were developing a national pride, audiences regarded the play as insulting to the Irish, and riots broke out in the theater. But The Playboy of the Western World, like In the Shadow of the Glen, eventually became a classic of the Irish Renaissance. Plays by Yeats to open at the Abbey included On Baile’s Strand (1904) and Deirdre (1907), both of which drew on the legend of Cú Chulainn. Other playwrights of the Irish Renaissance include George William Russell, William Boyle, and Padraic Colum.

Among the important prose writers of the Irish Renaissance was George Moore. His realistic stories were written in English but first published in Irish translation as An tÚr-Ghort (1902; The Untilled Field, 1903). Influenced by Moore, Pádraic O'Conaire began writing stories characterized by realism and simplicity of style. They were first published in an Irish-language newspaper and later collected in Nora Mharcuis Bhig agus Sgéalta Eile (Marcus Bhig's Daughter Nora, 1909).

C.

Rebellion and Disillusion

From 1916 to 1922 Ireland was in open rebellion against Britain. The rebellion began on Easter Monday in 1916 with an uprising that became known as the Easter Rebellion or Easter Rising. The leaders of the Easter Rebellion were executed afterward, an action that outraged the Irish people and won sympathy for the nationalist cause. In 1919 a group of Irish nationalists elected to the British parliament declared Ireland’s independence. Guerrilla warfare between Irish rebels and British occupying troops soon broke out. A truce was signed in 1921, and the following year Ireland was partitioned into the primarily Protestant Northern Ireland (with 6 counties) and the largely Roman Catholic Irish Free State (with 26 counties) in the south. During the war, Irish rebels formed the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to fight for Ireland’s independence. In Northern Ireland unionists wished to remain under British control.

One of the leaders of the Easter Rebellion was poet Patrick Pearse. From 1903 to 1909 he edited the Gaelic League newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light) and encouraged the development of a modern literature in Irish. Pearse also wrote stories, poetry, and essays himself in Irish and in English. His Collected Works (1917) were issued in five volumes after his execution for his part in the Easter Rebellion.

The uprisings of 1916 to 1922, a period sometimes referred to as the troubles, marked the end of the Irish Renaissance. Writings of the 1920s and 1930s reflect the disillusionment of the Irish people after the failure of the nationalist independence movements and the partition of Ireland. Playwright Sean O’Casey revived the Abbey Theatre, which had faltered as a result of a curfew during the troubles, with his trio of plays that take place in Dublin’s slums and revolve around Ireland’s struggle for independence. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and Juno and the Paycock (1924) have guerrilla warfare as their background. The third play, The Plough and the Stars (1926), focused on the Easter Rebellion. Dublin audiences rioted over O'Casey's critical portrayal of the nationalist martyrs only ten years after the rebellion.

Novelist Elizabeth Bowen evoked the doomed world of the privileged Anglo-Irish in her second novel, The Last September (1929), set in the Cork countryside during the troubles. The novels Without My Cloak (1931) and The Land of Spices (1941) by Kate O’Brien and the stories of Mary Lavin offered yet another perspective by focusing on middle-class life in the socially conservative Irish Free State, often told from the point of view of a woman.

Disillusionment with Irish life also can be seen in the work of James Joyce, one of the most important writers of fiction in the 20th century. Joyce considered the Dublin of his youth a 'center of paralysis,' dominated by the Catholic Church and British political authority. However, he did not join the nationalist movements and felt that he was insufficiently appreciated by the writers of the Irish Renaissance. From 1904 until his death in 1941 Joyce lived outside Ireland as an expatriate. Nevertheless, all his fiction takes place in Dublin.

In Joyce’s first major work, a collection of short stories called Dubliners (1914), he describes individuals trapped by family, work, Irish Catholic society, and a failure of nerve that prevents them from breaking away. In his first long work of fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus—like Joyce himself—escapes the constraints of family, nation, and church. But the reader meets Dedalus again in the novel Ulysses (1922), in which he returns home in search of his father. In this work, Joyce experimented with a narrative technique known as stream of consciousness. He used this technique to reveal a character’s thoughts and feelings in a sequence of associations, rather than in logical order, without commentary by the author. The psychological perceptions and literary innovations of Ulysses had enormous influence on modern literature. Joyce’s final work, the comic masterpiece Finnegans Wake, moves beyond Ireland to take on all language in a richly layered text full of puns and allusions. The language used by Joyce in his works influenced the plays and prose of his protégé, poet, novelist, and playwright Samuel Beckett, who lived and worked most of his adult life as an expatriate in Paris.

Irish-language literature from the 1920s to the 1940s often attempted to capture and record the dying way of life of the rural Irish people. Cré na Cille (Graveyard Clay, 1948), a novel by Máirtín O'Cadhain, is set in a graveyard where the dead talk among themselves, gossiping and nursing old grudges. The work comes close to those of Joyce in its mastery of language, the Cois Fharraige dialect of western Galway, and its narrative innovation. Three autobiographies produced on the Gaelic-speaking Blasket Islands, off Ireland’s western coast, reached wide audiences in English translations. Tomás O'Criomhthain wrote An tOileánach (1929; The Islandman, 1937); Muiris O'Súilleabháin brought out Fiche Bliain ag Fás (1933; Twenty Years A-growing, 1933); and brilliant storyteller Peig Sayers recorded her life in Peig (1936, translated in 1962). Myles na gCopaleen—the Irish name of Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien—satirized these island autobiographies, and those who sought to revive the Irish language, in An Béal Bocht (1941; The Poor Mouth, 1964).

Irish poetry in the first half of the 20th century was dominated by Yeats, whose early work drew inspiration from Irish mythology and folklore. His long narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) was based on the Fenian Cycle, and The Wind among the Reeds (1899) on Irish folk legends. Yeats’s reputation rests on his later work, The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), in which he confronts enduring questions about the meaning of life, death, art, and history in modern Ireland and the world. Yeats encouraged younger poets, including Padraic Colum and F. R. Higgins.

Another important poet of early 20th-century Ireland was George William Russell, known as Æ. His early work, including Collected Poems (1913), addresses questions of Irish independence and forms part of the Irish Renaissance. Later works, such as The House of the Titans and Other Poems (1934), meditates on the world of nature as a link between humanity and God. Æ mentored several younger poets, including James Stephens.

Other notable poets, including Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh, chose their own paths. In such collections as Pilgrimage and Other Poems (1929), Clarke wrote in English using traditional Irish meter. He also composed verse drama, novels, and romances set in medieval Ireland. Although Kavanagh could write lyrically of his home in County Monaghan, his long poem The Great Hunger (1942) is a metaphor for emotional and sexual hunger in the lonely Irish countryside. Kavanagh was a major influence on Irish poets of the 1960s.