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Page 1 of 3

Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Gregory Castle
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2024
    Print publication:
    31 May 2024
  • Yeats, Revivalism, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats's revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relation between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats's revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.

  • Chapter 12 - Synge and Disappearing Ireland

  • from Part III - Major Figures in Transition
  • Edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, Boston College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Irish Literature in Transition, 1880–1940
    Published online:
    28 February 2020
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020, pp 212-228

  • Summary

    For over a century, readers have savoured the paradox of J. M. Synge’s work, which combines, in negative dialectical fashion, a style of savage vitality with a keen sense of loss. These affective dimensions, which W. B. Yeats recognised as personality, are the key features of a transfigurative aesthetic that seeks to show how we are constantly misrecognising a world that is never quite what it seems. Thus the savagery of Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World is misrecognised as heroism and the grief felt by Pegeen Mike is twisted into a note of defiance at his loss. The dynamic found in Playboy can be found in just about every work Synge completed.

  • 2 - What Is Eating For? Food and Function in James Joyce's Fiction

  • Edited by Derek Gladwin, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    Gastro-modernism: Food, Literature, Culture
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    14 July 2020
    Print publication:
    10 September 2019, pp 35-52

  • Summary

    Food and Function

    At the advent of modernism in the novel, Tess Durbyfield, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), allows herself to be fed by Alex D’Urberville, whom she has just met. He “asked her if she liked strawberries”:

    “Yes,” said Tess, “when they come.”

    “They are already here.” D’Urberville began gathering specimens of

    the fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, pres-

    ently selecting a specially fine product of the “British Queen” variety,

    he stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.

    “No—no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand

    and her lips. “I would rather take it in my own hand.”

    “Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips

    and took it in.

    Tess's “slight distress” is a response to a forced sensual encounter, but it also registers the ambivalence of the strawberry, which is at once a “specimen” of fruit that she enjoys when “it comes” and a symbol of national identity. The fruit Alex tempts her with, a “British Queen,” serves blatantly as a symbol of sexual desire, of her place in a pastoral setting in which she labors as a dairy maid along with virile young men who work the land; but it also draws attention to the gulf between a D’Urberville and a Durbyfield.

    By the time Hardy published Tess, food in realist fiction no longer reliably served the function of marking social and economic status through the representation of consumption. From the exotic curry dinners served on middle-class tables in Thackeray's Vanity Fair to the gruel ladled up for the poor children in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, nineteenth-century novelists used food and its consumption, like it did most objects, to strengthen the verisimilitude of the representation and thereby affirm the established order of social distinctions and rankings. Though it indexes agricultural labor and production in the manner of conventional novelistic realism, Hardy's British Queen strawberry doubles as a stand in for something else; it behaves less like an index than a symbol, a conventional one about beauty and desire that is disoriented by Tess's resistance so that it symbolizes something about her own sensibilities, her pride, her sense of rectitude.

A History of Irish Modernism
  • Edited by Gregory Castle, Patrick Bixby
  • Published online:
    18 January 2019
    Print publication:
    24 January 2019
  • A History of Irish Modernism examines a wide variety of artworks (from the 1890s to the 1970s), including examples from literature, film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives that place Irish cultural production in new contexts. At the same time, the historical standpoint adopted in each chapter enables the contributors to examine how modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal distances. A History of Irish Modernism thus attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns - even as it embodies aesthetic principles that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and beyond.

  • Chapter 6 - The Modernist Bildungsroman

  • Edited by Sarah Graham, University of Leicester
  • Book:
    A History of the Bildungsroman
    Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019, pp 143-173

  • Summary

    Explores the destiny of a motif, the ‘portrait of the artist’, in Walter Pater, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, H.D. and Elizabeth Bowen. The overarching argument is that the crisis in the modernist Bildungsroman lies in the concept of Bildung itself, which pits an impossible ideal against the protagonist’s experience. This conflict is conveyed most compellingly through the ‘portrait of the artist’ motif, which seeks not to capture a static image of a person but to express the dynamism and expressive capacity of their inner life. In the experimental fictions examined, inner life is aligned with the created or expressed world of the work; this alignment becomes the ‘subject’ of modernist portraiture. The ‘portrait of the artist’ motif ultimately transforms into a mode of self-portraiture that merges the autobiographical real with the world of the work. From the Gothic deformations of Wilde to the meticulous realism of Forster to new modes of aesthetic self-fashioning found in Richardson and H.D., the modernist Bildungsroman presents us with the persistence of Bildung in the ‘weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ that Pater saw as the free expression of an aesthetic life.

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