Ireland, revolution, and the English modernist imagination : / Eve Patten

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Patten, Eve, author.

Series:

Oxford Academic

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

England.

Ireland.

Revolutions in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2022

Summary:

This book asks how English authors of the early to mid-twentieth century responded to the nationalist revolution in neighbouring Ireland in their work and explores this response as an expression of anxieties about, and aspirations within, England itself. Drawing predominantly on novels of this period, but also on letters, travelogues, literary criticism, and memoir, it illustrates how Irish affairs provided a marginal but pervasive point of reference for a wide range of canonical authors in England, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, and for lesser-known figures such as Ethel Mannin, George Thomson, and T.H. White. The book surveys these and other incidental writers within the broad framework of literary modernism, an arc seen to run in temporal parallel to Ireland's revolutionary trajectory from rebellion to independence. In this context, it addresses two distinct aspects of the Irish-English relationship as it features in the literature of the time: first, the uneasy recognition of a fundamental similarity between the two countries in terms of their potential for violent revolutionary instability, and second, the proleptic engagement of Irish events to prefigure, imaginatively, the potential course of England's evolution from the Armistice to the Second World War. Tracing these effects, this book offers a topical renegotiation of the connections between Irish and English literary culture, nationalism, and political ideology, together with a new perspective on the Irish sources engaged by English literary modernism.

Contents:

1 Ireland, Revolution and the English Modernist Imagination

2 Easter 1916 and the Celtic Primitive

3 The Strange Death of Liberal England

4 Ireland's West and the English Left

5 Ways of Escape

6 Visions of Excess

Coda

ISBN:

9780192640222

0192640224

9780191905674

0191905674

9780192640215

0192640216

OCLC:

1336405356