Celtic Revival? explores what happens when a society loses its wealth, its faith in government, and its trust in its Church. The glorious rise of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland was thought by many to be a model for future economic growth for countries around the world; its dramatic crash in 2008 resonated equally widely. Yet despite the magnitude of the ongoing collapse, Sean Kay shows that seen in historical perspective, the crisis is part of a much larger pattern of generations of progress and change. Kay draws on a rich blend of research, interviews with a broad spectrum of Irish society, and his own decades of personal experience to tell the story of Ireland today. He guides the reader through the country's major economic challenges, political transformation, social change, the crisis in the Irish Catholic Church, and the rise of gay rights and multiculturalism. He takes us through the streets of Derry and Belfast to understand the Northern Ireland peace process and the daunting task of peace building that has only just begun. Finally, we see how Irish foreign policy has long been a model for balancing competing interests and values. Kay concludes by highlighting Ireland's lessons for the world and mapping a vital path for twenty-first-century challenges and opportunities for the coming generations in Ireland and beyond.

In Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle examines the impact of anthropology on the work of Irish Revivalists such as W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge and James Joyce. Castle argues that anthropology enabled Irish Revivalists to confront and combat British imperialism. Castle shows how Irish Modernists employed textual and rhetorical strategies first developed in anthropology to translate, reassemble, and edit oral and folk-cultural material. Drawing on a wide range of postcolonial theory, this book should be of interest to scholars in Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and Modernism.

James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson.

Despite distance and differences in culture, the early twentieth century was a time of literary cross-pollination between Ireland and Japan. Notably, the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats had a powerful influence on Japanese letters, at the same time that contemporary and classical Japanese literature and theatre impacted Yeats’s own literary experiments. Citing an extraordinary range of Japanese and Irish texts, Aoife Hart argues that Japanese translations of Irish Gaelic folklore and their subsequent reception back in Ireland created collisions, erasures, and confusions in the interpretations of literary works. Assessing the crucial roles of translation and transnationalism in cross-cultural exchanges between the Celtic Revival and Japanese writers of the modern period, Hart proves that interlingual dialogue and folklore have the power to reconstruct a culture’s sense of heritage. Rejecting the notion that the Celtic Revival was inward and parochial, Hart suggests that, seeking to protect their heritage from the forces of globalization, the Irish adapted their understanding of heritage to one that exists within the transnational contexts of modernity – a heritage that is locally produced but internationally circulated. In doing so, Hart maintains that the cultural contact and translation between the East and West traveled in more than one direction: it was a dialogue presenting modernity’s struggles with cosmopolitanism, gender, ethnic identity, and transnationalism. An inspired exploration of transpacific literary criticism, Yeats scholarship, and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Ancestral Recall tracks the interplay of complex ideas across languages and discourses.

Handbook of the Irish Revival collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters written during the Revival.

This collection charts the vital contextual backgrounds to James Joyce's life and writing. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.

First published in 1987, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism demonstrates the nature and role of cultural nationalism as a separate movement in the creation of modern nations. This is done through an intensive study of the modern Irish movements, and in particular the Gaelic revival at the end of the nineteenth century, which makes clear the importance of cultural nationalism as a vision and politics in its own right. The author, by approaching his material as both historian and sociologist, is able to illuminate the Irish case of nationalism by placing it in a broad, comparative perspective, showing how cultural nationalism has often provided those answers to the problems of nation building and the rediscovery of national identity that political nationalism failed to provide. This book will be of interest to all those in the social sciences and history who are concerned with problems of national identity, the uses of history and culture in the creation of modern nations, and the particular case of the development of nationalist movements in Ireland.