Course details
Name: ENGL - 542
Title: IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL
Section: 01
Semester: Fall - 2020
Credits: 3
Description:
This seminar will study the folklore, literature, history, and cultures of the Irish Revival (1895 – c. 1922).
We’ll begin with fairies, considering the cultural politics of collecting fairy legends as we read three varieties of Revivalist ethnography: Yeats’s Celtic Twilight (stories from "peasants" in the west of Ireland modified for sale to metropolitan audiences), Synge’s Aran Islands (the travel writing of an educated, Europeanized Dublin Protestant visiting a rural, Catholic, "primitive" island), and Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (fairy legends with a proto-feminist emphasis on childbirth, female healers, and the abduction of children, collected from country people in Galway and the Aran Islands).
We’ll also read The Burning of Bridget Cleary, a narrative account of the 1895 death of a young woman whose male relatives believed she was not herself but a fairy.
Lady Gregory and Yeats’s co-authored “incendiary folk-drama” Kathleen Ní Houlihan will also be on the syllabus, as well as Yeats’s poems and Gregory’s plays. We’ll study Joyce's Dubliners as a form of "counter-revival” and a reaction to the rural emphasis of the major Revivalist writers. Later in the semester, the class will focus on the Easter Rising of 1916, reading not only Yeats’s many poems on this subject but the poems of the rebel leaders themselves and eye-witness accounts of participants in the Rising. Having studied peasants and rebels, we will not neglect the rich and powerful: students will also become familiar with the domestic culture of the "Big House" and Yeats’s interest in it as a symbol of a moribund class and as an architectural measure of masculinity. Finally, we’ll read autobiographies of two women political activists, Maud Gonne and Kathleen Clarke. The approach throughout will be pluralist and eclectic, using feminist, postcolonial and new-critical methodologies when they seem helpful, but seeking always to situate our reading among the many voices and practices of the Irish Revival.
Last updated on By
McDiarmid Lucy (mcdiarmidl)
Schedule: Wednesday From 5:30 pm To 8:00 pm
Graduation requirements:
- Any Literature (1e)
- Women and Gender Studies (3c)
- Graduate (BA/MA)
Teaching Faculty: McDiarmid Lucy (mcdiarmidl)
Is course canceled: No