Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Joyce, race and racism: introduction
- 2 ‘No such race’: Finnegans Wake and the Aryan myth
- 3 Celt, Teuton and Aryan
- 4 ‘Our darling breed’: the Wake, social Darwinism and eugenics
- 5 Atlanta-Arya: theosophy, race and the Wake
- 6 ‘Hung Chung Egglyfella’: staged race in Ulysses and the Wake
- 7 ‘And the prankquean pulled a rosy one’: filth, fascism and the family
- 8 Race and reading: conclusion
- Notes
- Index
3 - Celt, Teuton and Aryan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Joyce, race and racism: introduction
- 2 ‘No such race’: Finnegans Wake and the Aryan myth
- 3 Celt, Teuton and Aryan
- 4 ‘Our darling breed’: the Wake, social Darwinism and eugenics
- 5 Atlanta-Arya: theosophy, race and the Wake
- 6 ‘Hung Chung Egglyfella’: staged race in Ulysses and the Wake
- 7 ‘And the prankquean pulled a rosy one’: filth, fascism and the family
- 8 Race and reading: conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Why should we wish to make Ireland more Celtic than it is – why should we de-Anglicise it at all? … [because] our Gaelic past … is really at the bottom of the Irish heart.
Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ (1894)Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as a twilight of the reason.
J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘English and Welsh’ (1963)PRECURSOR – A CYCLOPEAN PERSPECTIVE
The origins of the term ‘Celt’ are in classical literature, though its usage there had little to do with modern notions of race. In Michael Chapman's account The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992), the Celtic identity in classical literature is understood not as a product of any biological or even cultural reality but in terms of the rationalising that a more powerful culture makes about a much weaker one. Thus the term ‘Celt’ meant something like ‘non-Greek speaking uncivilised barbarian in the north and west’ and the disappearance of the ‘Celt’ became the result not of massacre and destruction, but of assimilation where ‘the clear distinction between civilised Greek and Rome and the barbarian’ disappeared. It is for this reason, according to Chapman, that between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, and with a few ‘fantastic scholarly exceptions’, no one ‘called themselves or anybody else Celts’.
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- Information
- Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake' , pp. 42 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007