Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section One LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
- Section Two INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
- Chapter 7 ‘Make a Letter Like a Monument’: Remnants of Modernist Literary Institutions in Ireland
- Chapter 8 Storm in a Teacup: Irish Modernist Art
- Chapter 9 ‘Particles of Meaning’: The Modernist Afterlife in Irish Design
- Chapter 10 Animal Afterlives: Equine Legacies in Irish Visual Culture
- Chapter 11 Choreographies of Irish Modernity: Alternative ‘Ideas of a Nation’ in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well and Ó Conchúir's Cure
- Chapter 12 The Modernist Impulse in Irish Theatre: Anu Productions and the Monto
- Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter 10 - Animal Afterlives: Equine Legacies in Irish Visual Culture
from Section Two - INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section One LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
- Section Two INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
- Chapter 7 ‘Make a Letter Like a Monument’: Remnants of Modernist Literary Institutions in Ireland
- Chapter 8 Storm in a Teacup: Irish Modernist Art
- Chapter 9 ‘Particles of Meaning’: The Modernist Afterlife in Irish Design
- Chapter 10 Animal Afterlives: Equine Legacies in Irish Visual Culture
- Chapter 11 Choreographies of Irish Modernity: Alternative ‘Ideas of a Nation’ in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well and Ó Conchúir's Cure
- Chapter 12 The Modernist Impulse in Irish Theatre: Anu Productions and the Monto
- Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The sound of hooves in Irish art […] seems highly unlikely to die out; it is part of the national psyche, admit it or not.
Brian Fallon, Irish Arts ReviewFor centuries, the horse has functioned as a compelling symbol within Irish mythology, literature and visual culture, often serving as an emblem of national identity. From the imposing steed that conveys Oisin to Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth, and the horses that appear alongside humans in the ‘Book of Kells’, to Art O'Leary's white-nosed mare, the Pegasus-like phantom in W. B. Yeats's ‘Easter, 1916’, and the grey charger of Into the West (1992), the horse stands with humans as a partner in work and war, a near- equal who transports objects and conveys humans, often to supernatural worlds. This notion of transportation, not only physically moving people and objects between locations but also moving human beings spiritually, emerges as a central trope of the horse in ancient and modern Irish culture.
In formal terms, the horse figure's animal afterlife emanates from its persistence across the centuries and from its privileged relationship to temporal and spatial liminality. Linked to movement and mediation, the horse simultaneously invokes the romantic and the modern, the rural and the urban, the earth-bound past and a heavenly future. The horse functions as the quintessential anachronism: an antiquated throwback and a figure of timeless endurance that is almost always pictured as out of sync with whatever present moment it is used to signify. Enlightenment modernity gave birth to notions of historical progress and temporal homogeneity, and literary and cultural modernisms called into question that Enlightenment project through the representation, in language and images, of the radical break, crisis and fragmentation. The horse engages both regimes, its physicality expressing both the measured sequential rhythm of the military march and the sublime transcendence of the leap. The horse is able to call up a backward-looking nostalgia and a forward-looking aspiration. In its double signification – and without even beginning to address the role and plight of actual, embodied horses within Irish economic and cultural history – the horse can be recruited to explore modernity's fundamental contradictions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 141 - 152Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016