Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If Joyce's weapon was the sharpened pen, England's was, he wrote, a little blunter: ‘her weapons were, and are, the battering-ram, the club and the noose’. At the opening of the previous chapter I looked at one book held in Joyce's Trieste library and it seems apt to conclude with another, published in the year Joyce left with Nora for the Continent: Michael Davitt's The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland. In his preface to that book Davitt sums up what he feels has been the injurious nature of the relationship between England and Ireland:
Historically put, England's rule of Ireland, down to 1879, has been a systematic opposition to the five great underlying principles of civilized society, as these lived and had their being and expression in Celtic character: love of country, which is an exceptionally strong and affectionate sentiment in the Irish heart; a racial attachment to the domestic hearthstone and to family association with land, unequalled in the social temperament of any other people; a fervent and passionate loyalty to religious faith, unsurpassed by that of any Christian nation; and a national pride in learning which once made Ireland ‘a country of schools and scholars,’ with a wide European reputation.
The social and spiritual qualities, recognized as virtues in other lands, have been held as crimes in Ireland during many centuries by English rulers. Patriotism was made to earn the penalty of the scaffold and the prison.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Journey WestwardJoyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival, pp. 159 - 161Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012