The Irish revival and modernism

Abstract

The "Irish Revival" and "modernism" are an unlikely pairing. For the major critics of modernism in the mid-century, like Richard Ellmann or Hugh Kenner, the Irish modernists were modern insofar as they transcended their national background. Whereas the towering Irish modernists, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, took their lead from international, cosmopolitan, and generally metropolitan artistic currents, the revivalists were, in this view, nationalist, valorizing a rural and premodern Ireland swathed in cultural purity and twilit nostalgia. The opposition, often calcifying into reductive duality between Joyce the pioneering modernist and W. B. Yeats the belated Romantic, was buttressed vario..