Chapter 1 explores modern adaptations of the medieval passion play, analyzing dramas by Sadakichi Hartmann, W. B. Yeats, Djuna Barnes, and Sophie Treadwell that return to narratives of the Christian Passion in order to summon theater’s own artistic resurrections. These profane works were composed in the conceptual penumbra of Friedrich Nietzsche’s iconic The Anti-Christ. Although they seem to announce a radical departure from medieval sources imagined to have a purely devotional function, they actually follow the medieval passion play in sliding between profanation and consecration. Such dramatic experiments pry open the layered temporalities of the passion play as they generate halting improvisations toward a new theatrical future, developing an orientation to the past that is at once resistive and recursive. The figure of Christ’s body in the genre of the passion play thus brings into view modern drama’s rites of renewal, anxiously heralding a new theater waiting to be born.

The epilogue argues for the validity of interpreting the medieval material examined in this monograph as the origins of English writing in Ireland. It explores the way post-medieval writers reflected on the medieval origins of Ireland’s literary tradition and the importance of the early English context, both medieval and early modern, within the literary landscape. In particular, it examines how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, W. B. Yeats reflected on Ireland’s medieval and early modern literary tradition and colonial history, arguing for a vision of Anglo-Irish literature which sought to fuse the English and Gaelic threads of the past. It also examines James Joyce’s presentation of his own writing as ‘mediaeval’ in essence and his acknowledgement of his debt to the literature and character of that period to suggest that medieval writing in English has shaped Ireland’s literature and complicated its sense of identity and relationship with the past.

The earliest written poetry in Ireland is mediated through a Christian lens. Monasticmanuscripts reveal rich strata of pre-Christian myths and poetic forms that bleed intoChristian content, potentially disrupting the intended orthodoxy. These texts display aknotwork of pagan and Christian elements, equally alert to the natural world and theincarnational word.  A delight in the materiality of the word, in the miraculous powerof the manuscript, is a distinctive feature of this early poetry, and tells us somethingabout the high status of the poet in traditional Gaelic society. The preservation ofGaelic myths and values by monastic scribes provided Revivalist poets like Yeatswith a pre-Christian Irish identity rooted in the power of nature, and allowed Yeats tofind a way to be Irish and not Catholic. The pagan world kicks back against Christianorthodoxy again in the work of later poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, AustinClarke, and Paula Meehan.

Chapter 5 outlines the way in which Plath’s poetry engages with the language and performance of ritual magic. It introduces the concept of ritual magic that employs ritualistic, incantatory language, such as chants, spells, and ritualistic acts. The chapter focuses on two poems, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Burning the Letters’, that engage with the idea of poetic spellcasting and argues that the poems seek inspiration from the ritual of exorcism or banishing spirits. The close reading relies on the drafts of the poems, highlighting Plath’s attribution of magical powers to poetic language that she often erased from the final versions of her poems. The chapter asks how Plath’s poems interrogate what constitutes ritual magic, engaging with the blurred boundaries between mundane and magical rituals and utilising the powers of poetic language.

Chapter 2 considers the desire to escape impressionism which shaped Yeats’s early writings. Yeats’s formative visual interests are usually discussed in terms of the tastes he inherited from his Pre-Raphaelite father, but in his early verse and criticism he would often also express hatred for, and a desire to escape, French art of the later nineteenth century. In his writings of the 1890s and 1900s, it is the paintings of Édouard Manet which most disturb Yeats, appearing repeatedly to threaten his early theories of symbolism. Time and again, Yeats strove to counter them with the art of Titian, which came to serve as a paradigm for his own evolving poetics. The present chapter considers the antagonism in Yeats’s thought between modern French painting and the art of the Renaissance, as well as the cognate binaries (of hard outline against glimmering colour, unity against disunity) this came to encompass, before exploring their formative influence on the symbolist poetics he was developing at the turn of the century.

In his chapter, Gregory Castle explores the cultural need for heroism expressed by W. B. Yeats and Alice Milligan at a time (the first decade of the twentieth century) when hope for the future was an explicit component of revivalist discourse across the arts and the political spectrum. Yeats’s In the Seven Woods (1903) offers a vision of legendary and contemporary heroism in which love and desire are transformed in a process in which the experience of beauty and its loss, as well as the representation of this experience, become heroic endeavors. In Milligan’s Hero Lays (1908), heroism does not rely on a transposition of love into the context of heroism. Rather, her vision is informed by political activism; her poems mine the ancient legends for a model of heroic action that would be suitable for the nationalist cause of her own time. For both poets, the heroic ethos of the legendary past is sustained as part of the contemporary poet’s bardic responsibility.

In her chapter, Pilar Villar-Argáiz shows how the poetry of Eavan Boland often invokes the very revivalism she seems at times to critique. Villar-Argáiz examines a number of Boland’s poetic predecessors in order to show her multiple points of contact with the Irish past. Though Boland engaged critically with W. B. Yeats’s revivalism, particularly as reflected in the “lyric imperative” that runs throughout his work, her posthumous published collection The Historians represents a partial reconciliation with Yeats’s work and poetic example. This reconciliation allows Boland to celebrate what she inherits from Yeats – particularly his use of use poetry to create a sense of community, not only among other writers but more broadly among the Irish people at large. Boland’s work strives for this sense of community, of belonging through relationships with landscape and “domestic interiors. In her late twentieth century revivalism, Boland thus revitalizes the bardic function so important to Yeats.

In her chapter, Rosie Lavan explores Eavan Boland’s relationship to two post-Revival poets, Padraic Fallon and Sheila Wingfield. These under-studied writers occupy an insecure position with respect to the legacies of the literary revival, particularly the work of Yeats. This was especially true of Fallon who believed Yeats’s influence to be deleterious to poets who followed him. As many critics have pointed out, Boland’s engagement with the Irish poetic tradition, particularly its emphasis on male mastery, is both powerful and ambivalent, for despite the critical gaze she trains on this tradition she is able to recognize and make use of Yeats’s poetic bequest. As Lavan shows, Wingfield provided a counter influence in the sense that her work depicted the struggle with the pressures of time. To resign herself to time, Boland came to understand, is to come to a fuller understanding of how she defines herself as a poet.

Heather Ingman, in her chapter, explores W. B. Yeats’s legacy in the construction of the myth surrounding the Big House, the country estates that served as a potent symbol of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy rule in Ireland. The Big House novel, which rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century, created over the ensuing two hundred years new grounds of recognition for the iconic Georgian structures that presided over vast demesnes until the Land Wars and the War of Independence altered forever the Anglo-Irish landscape. Ingman shows how the Yeatsian myth of the Big House was undermined in novels by, among others, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnston, William Trevor, and John Banville. But even in the process of dismantling the myth, these novels retained a small portion of the Big House’s cultural value because its symbolic value could be taken for granted, if only to transform it.

In his chapter, Christopher Morash examines the modern myth of Revival, which takes the form of what Roland Barthes calls a new “mythic concept.” A good example of this form of myth is the story Yeats tells of meeting Synge in Paris, a meeting that Morash claims did not necessarily have to take place in order for the story to acquire a mythic function. A more substantial instance of the myth of Revival emerges from Synge’s interest in philosophy and science, particularly the work of Herbert Spencer, which enabled him to create a mythic vision of nature based on the ambivalent relationship between the observer and natural world they observe. Synge’s reading of Spencer ultimately leads him to confront early on a central problem of later modernist writers, that is, the instability of the subject/object relationship and the “ambivalent revival” of the observer’s perspective in aesthetic production.

This chapter reflects on Sean O’Casey’s work from a postcolonial critical perspective. The focus is firstly upon his early Abbey plays, especially The Plough and the Stars, which are shown to be significant for postcolonial criticism because of their content, the contexts of their initial Abbey productions, and the ways that key aspects of their critical history play outsized roles in framing understandings of the postcolonial critical endeavour. The chapter shows how O’Casey responded to the political complexities of Ireland’s revolutionary era of the 1910s and 1920s. The chapter then examines O’Casey’s later plays, showing how his responses to the revolutionary era evolved as he dealt directly with postcolonial Ireland and the fascism of the 1930s–1960s.

Between 1975 and 1992, David Krause edited and then published a comprehensive set of O’Casey’s letters that had not been published before. This chapter focuses on O’Casey’s inventiveness as a letter writer, and shows how he includes a wide and sometimes contradictory assortment of voices in order to make his correspondence vibrant and engaging. Letter-writing enabled O’Casey to project his moods and opinions to recipients who knew him in specific contexts, and such writing reveals his fascinating reactions to public and private events. This chapter addresses the use which O’Casey made of letters, and the complex image of the man which emerges from them.

In 1928-29, politicians of the Irish Free State debated the Censorship of Publications Bill, which included a clause banning print media on contraception. They contended that ignorance of birth control would increase reproductive rates and prevent Irish “race suicide.” W. B. Yeats contested the Bill in the press, in part due to apprehension about Catholic population growth and dwindling Protestant numbers. This chapter positions the Free State’s “race suicide” debates into the context of their eugenic origins, and it argues that Yeats’s reaction to the Bill set the stage for his eugenic plan in On the Boiler, one that responded to what he believed was an Anglo-Irish “race suicide.” Through coded references to Irish class divisions, Yeats proposes restraints on Catholic reproductive rights, strategies of selective breeding among an Irish elite, and population control achieved through violence. His ideas about race and reproduction offer a study of scientific racism that reflects fringe and mainstream rhetoric that endures today in the form of “replacement theory.” An investigation of Yeats contributes to the ongoing, multidisciplinary effort to pinpoint the origins, development, and effects of theories that bring together questions of science, race, reproduction, and rights.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

This chapter discusses centrism as another face of moderation. It distinguishes between various meanings of centrism and makes a connection between a vital center and political moderation. It also considers a few concrete topics on which a centrist agenda is possible and desirable.

The Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century was heavily invested in the value of orature, characteristically associated with peasant culture as the living remnant of pre-modern society, which is typically seen as being on the verge of its final disappearance. Focusing on Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats, this essay resituates the relationship between orature and modernity in Irish culture in the context of technology, noting that the Revival coincides exactly with the period – from the late 1880s to the early 1920s – that saw the emergence of key technologies of sound: the telephone, the gramophone/phonograph, and later radio. A key concept here is the idea of over-lapping histories of technology; running alongside histories of technological innovation, political economy, and social change is a hidden history of technologies of sound as the ghost of oral culture, imbricated in some of the same literary narratives that memorialise the pre-modern.

This chapter considers the poetry of leading Irish poets (including W. B. Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy) and how their poems encountered World War One both in contemporary time and also retrospectively, in the poems of Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, among others. An important feature of this chapter is the retrieval of several forgotten or neglected voices, including Winifred Letts and Mary Devenport O’Neill. The politics of ‘Empire’ and the role of Irish nationalism are considered in the context of the country, north and south, concluding with a survey of Irish poets writing today and their understanding of the problematic legacies of World War One in relation to Irish literary, cultural, and political history.

This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.

Chapter 5 considers the implications of modernist efforts to rethink notions of gender and creative autonomy for our understanding of genius. Although some writers and artists imagined androgyny as something a man and woman could achieve together, the same does not appear to have been true of genius, which remains for the modernists a phenomenon exhibited or embodied by individuals. I contend that the modernists’ own practice of cross-sex collaboration challenges this conception, as evidenced by two examples: the play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the novel Under the Volcano, written by Malcolm Lowry with significant input from his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry. Neither of these masterpieces could have been realized by just one of its coauthors alone, yet no member of either couple thought of that couple itself as “a genius.” This limitation on the conception of genius came with significant personal costs and misrepresents the true nature of the writers’ powerful displays of joint creativity. Genius, I conclude, is not solely the provenance of individuals but an invaluable human capacity that can draw strength from both male and female participation.