Background Information

Paper and Panel Proposals

Registration

Join IASIL

Accommodation

Contacts

Timetable

Graduate Fellowships

Independent Panels

Accepted Speakers

Publication

Travelling to Ireland

Galway - links

About NUI Galway

2004 - literary anniversaries

Galway and Irish Writing

PANEL PRESENTATION -European Perspectives On The Irish Literary Revival

Professor Mary C. King (National College of Ireland, Dublin) : A Synge for our times – Yeats’s enquiring man revisited
Jerry Nolan (British Association of Irish Studies): Edward Martyn’s Path from Greece to Ireland
Rosalinde Schut (Trinity College Dublin): Yeats, Pirandello and Italy
Professor WJ. Mc Cormack: Yeats: with Erich Gottgetreu and Lauro de Bosis

In revisiting the Irish Literary Revival a century or so on, the softest option is to shuffle the critical terms of interpretation according to the literary fashion of the day towards a view of that apparently well-known phenomenon. Surely a great challenge for the literary historian now is to explore the ways not taken which might have been inspired by developments in Europe and indeed might have well come about, if W. B. Yeats had not so single-mindedly masterminded the direction and interpretation of the whole movement. Recently Yeats’s dominant role has on occasion be more critically presented , but it has very rarely been rigorously questioned. Yeats’s authoritative – and at times authoritarian – pronouncements have helped to promote the generally accepted view that the primitive/peasant quintessence of the Irish folk was at the heart of the Literary Revival. If fellow Irish Revival writers were judged by Yeats not to be in tune with his priorities in this direction, they tended to be either interpreted in such a way as to advance the Yeatsian vision, or to be expelled gratuitously from his movement on the grounds of being talentless or misguided.

Foremost among Yeatsian heroes, J.M. Synge had very significant non-Irish intellectual affiliations: study at the Sorbonne, interest in Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche, admiration for his contemporary Pierre Loti and for the drama of Ibsen. Synge may have written peasant plays but only in the sense that Goethe’s Faust might be said to be folk drama. Describing all art as ‘a collaboration’, in his major prose work, ‘The Aran Islands’ he set out to explore the nature of world happenings through an informed dialectic between folk-tales and peasant life and the experiences and preoccupations of his fictionalised self as artist and man. Chief among Yeatsian villains, Edward Martyn brought to his writings a mind steeped in the Hellenic aesthetics of Winckelmann, St. John Chrysostom’s ideal of the Christian City, a Rabelaisan view of human behaviour and the symbolist plays of Ibsen, all stations on the winding by-path to Martyn’s project for the revival of all the Celtic arts. In his Gaelic League pamphlet, Martyn most looked forward to the time when an Ibsen or a Goethe would write in the Irish language. For reasons rarely explored with critical trenchancy, Yeats in his memoirs consistently scorned and scurrilously dismissed Martyn’s cultural project.

Then during the 1920s and 1930s, with Synge and Martyn by then in their graves, Yeats himself developed some interesting views of contemporary events in Europe and , in particular, showed some interest in Italy and in the work of Nobel Prize winning Italian writer, Luigi Pirandello.

Professor King will develop themes from her chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Theatre, ‘J. M. Synge, “National Theatre” and the post-Protestant Imagination’ by concentrating on Synge’s first play When the Moon has Set, The Vita Vecchia and Etude Morbide, critical essays and continental studies and interest in Ibsen. Jerry Nolan will show how the Greek preoccupations of Martyn’s non-Irish satiric-romantic novel Morgante the Lesser (1890) prepared well the ground for his involvement in the Irish Revival; and go on to argue for the need to recover, for academic study and experimental production, Martyn’s most challenging plays The Heather Field, Maeve and An Enchanted Sea as an unique trilogy of Irish symbolist plays which admirably display European and Irish dimensions. Rosalinde Schut will examine the nature and extent of Yeats’s interest in the plays of Luigi Pirandello, some of which were produced by the Dublin Drama League; and Yeats’s significant response to the Volta Conference in Rome during 1934. Professor Mc Cormack will explore a couple of Yeats’s revealing encounters with largely forgotten European figures: with Erich Gottgetreu, a German socialist journalist who had a very argumentative lunch at Coole Park with Lady Yeats and Yeats on 15 August 1928; and with the Italian dramatist and translator Lauro de Bosis whose The Story of My Death, published by Faber, was in Yeats’s library and who expressed his disillusionment with Mussolini’s regime by flying his own plane over Rome and distributing his anti-fascist leaflet before ‘disappearing’.

IASIL 2004 is hosted by The National University of Ireland, Galway