Modernism and the Celtic Revival

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 even as these Irish writers remained ambivalently dependent on the cultural and political discourses they sought to undermine. Castle shows how Irish Modernists employed textual and rhetorical strategies first developed in anthropology to translate reassemble and edit oral and folk-cultural material. In doing so he claims they confronted and undermined inherited notions of identity which Ireland often a site of ethnographic curiosity throughout the nineteenth-century had been subject to. Drawing on a wide range of post-colonial theory this book should be of interest to scholars in Irish studies post-colonial studies and Modernism.