Celtic Fringes: The Irish Cultural Revival and the Scottish Literary Renaissance

Zero in on the writers who fueled revolutionary literary movements in late nineteenth-century Ireland and early twentieth-century Scotland.

TEST

Around the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire began to experience tensions in its Celtic fringe. The Irish Home Rule movement led by Charles Stewart Parnell agitated for a looser relationship to Britain and its example fostered the early stirrings of Scottish Home Rule in the early twentieth century. Both of these movements were unsuccessful but their failure led to literary movements where these social and political tensions found expression: the Irish Cultural Revival of the late nineteenth century and the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the early twentieth century.

Unionist clubs marching down Donegall Square North in Belfast on 9 April 1912

In Ireland, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge refashioned ancient Irish myths and legends and depicted the hard, unromantic lives of the poor deprived classes in the cities and countryside. Influenced by contemporary European literature, they established the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey Theatre). Cathleen ni Houlihan, a highly nationalist play, received a tumultuous reception and J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) led to riots due to its depictions of Irish womanhood. With a strong focus on writings in dialects of Hiberno-English, the Abbey was a crucible in which the debates about Irish cultural identity were enacted, while Yeats’ English language poetry channelled the public’s mixed feelings of nationalism and its costs.

Ireland’s fight for independence gave impetus to Scottish writers who were also starting to reassess their relationship with Britain in the early twentieth century. In Montrose, a coterie of writers developed around Hugh MacDiarmid including Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Edwin and Willa Muir. Torn between nationalism, socialism, and communism, this group and their arguments defined a range of possibilities for Scottish literature and nationhood. Gibbon’s feminist “land novel” Sunset Song, explored the end of an agricultural way of life in the face of industrialisation and war. And Hugh McDiarmid championed the Scots dialect in his long modernist poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Scotland could not follow in Irish footsteps, but together, Irish and Scottish writers established a permanent counterculture to the prevailing English literary canon, an idea that continues to haunt British literature and culture into the present. This course will explore these writers and their contested legacies.

Course Outline

Set Texts

  • W.B. Yeats, Selected Poetry
  • Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan
  • JM Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
  • Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song
  • Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Poetry