‘Everything seems gone’: Architecture and the Celtic Revival in Scotland

This chapter discusses the compositions of the blind seventeenth- and eighteenth-century harper-composer Turlough Carolan (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin) and the manner in which they were employed during the Celtic Revival by eighteenth-century Irish antiquarians and scholars in their recovery of the Gaelic past. Motivated by an interest in the native music and song of Ireland that was in turn sparked by the romantic movement, the vogue for primitivism, and the cult of the bard, scholars such as Joseph Cooper Walker, Charlotte Brooke, and James Hardiman re-invented Carolan’s image as that of a bard and a musical genius and elevated his compositions to a higher status than they had achieved during his lifetime. In doing so, they brought his work to a wider English-speaking audience.

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The Secret of the Celts Revisited

Religion and Theology ◽

10.1163/15743012-02401007 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 24 (1-2) ◽

pp. 130-155

Author(s):

Jacqueline Borsje

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Case Studies ◽

Irish Literature ◽

Traditional Society ◽

Dominant Culture ◽

Old Irish ◽

Celtic Revival ◽

Celtic Languages ◽

Celtic Culture ◽

Way Of Thinking

What makes the Celts so popular today? Anton van Hamel and Joep Leerssen published on the popularity of imagery connected with pre-Christian Celts, Van Hamel seeing the holistic worldview and Leerssen mysteriousness as appealing characteristics. They explain waves of ‘Celtic revival’ that washed over Europe as reaction and romanticising movements that search for alternatives from contemporaneous dominant culture. Each period has produced its modernized versions of the Celtic past. Besides periodical heightened interest in things Celtic, Van Hamel saw a permanent basis of attraction in Celtic texts, which accommodate ‘primitive’ and romantic mentalities. This article also analyses Celtic Christianity (through The Celtic Way by Ian Bradley and The Celtic Way of Prayer by Esther de Waal) on the use of Celtic texts and imagery of Celtic culture. Two case studies are done (on the use of the Old-Irish Deer’s Cry and the description of a nineteenth-century Scottish ritual). Both the current search for ‘spirituality’ and the last wave of ‘Celtic revival’ seem to have sprung from a reaction movement that criticizes dominant religion/culture and seek inspiration and precursors in an idealized past. The roots of this romantic search for a lost paradise are, however, also present in medieval Irish literature itself. Elements such as aesthetics, imaginative worlds and the posited lost beauty of pre-industrial nature and traditional society are keys in explaining the bridges among the gap between ‘us’ and the Celts. The realization that Celtic languages are endangered or dead heightens the feeling of loss because they are the primary gates towards this lost way of (thinking about) life.

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Seumas O’Sullivan and Revivalist Nature Poetry

Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789620320.003.0011 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 203-222

Author(s):

Seán Hewitt

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Natural Science ◽

Physical World ◽

Natural World ◽

Nature Poetry ◽

Celtic Revival ◽

Natural Historian

The Irish Revival was, amongst other things, an attempt to ‘re-enchant’ the Irish natural world as both a protest against Anglicisation and Enlightenment values. Through a study of the poetry of a lesser-known Revivalist poet, Seumas O’Sullivan, who was a keen natural historian, and thus engaged with the popular discourses and practices of natural science in the period, this chapter discusses Revivalist nature poetry as a form of ‘re-enchantment’. In doing so, it also considers how engagement with natural history in the period effected a shift in the poetic relationship to materiality, considering the movement between Celtic Revival poetry and later Revivalist work in term of a closer attention to the physical world.

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Introduction

The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433952.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-32

Author(s):

Michael Shaw

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Cultural Nationalism ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Cultural Revival ◽

Cultural Traditions ◽

Scottish Parliament ◽

Celtic Revival ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

Literary Revival ◽

Set Up

The introduction to this book begins by illustrating that many writers and critics in the 1890s identified an artistic and literary revival in fin-de-siècle Scotland, one that hoped to defend Scottish cultural traditions and revive Scotland’s status as an international cultural centre. Despite these statements, the period has come to be associated with insularity, anti-nationalism and sentimentality, especially in Scottish literary criticism. The introduction establishes the book’s aim: to uncover the concerns with cultural revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, before going on to set up the key contexts and parameters for the book. Building on John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism, I define my terms and then introduce key political contexts, highlighting that cultural revival efforts ran alongside (and intersected with) a prominent late-Victorian political campaign to establish a Scottish Parliament. I then introduce the key artistic movements that helped support fin-de-siècle cultural revivalism – decadence and symbolism – and I discuss the ways in which they complemented the Celtic Revival.

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SEVERING CONNECTIONS WITH IRELAND: Women and the Irish Free State in Beckett's Writing

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd hui ◽

10.1163/18757405-015001008 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 57-69

Author(s):

Rina Kim

Keyword(s):

Free State ◽

Celtic Revival ◽

Revival Movement ◽

Irish Free State ◽

Female Characterization

Beckett's female characterization in his early fiction is grotesque, devouring and sexually provocative. The intention of this article is to examine how such characterization is closely related to Beckett's resistance to the Irish Free State and the Celtic Revival movement by showing that the characterization can be attributed to the impulse to satirize the Celtic revivalists' portrayal of the idealized woman-as-Ireland. This article will argue that the male protagonists' attempt to achieve detachment from the possessive women in Beckett's early fiction gives expression to the author's desire for exile as well as to distance himself from the predominant literary nationalism.

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