Irish renaissance

As the Irish Renaissance ( English Irish Renaissance , also Irish Revival or incorrectly Celtic Revival , Celtic Dawn , Irish Athbheochan Cheilteach ) a multitude of endeavors, movements and individual persons is summarized, the late 19th century and early 20th century in the broadest sense aimed at a revival of Irish identity and culture .

Origins

After the remnants of the Irish nobility had largely fled the country in 1607 ( Flight of the Earls ) , traditional Irish-Gaelic culture and art no longer had a social and political basis. The Irish-language literature flattened with few exceptions rapidly, poets and singers were unemployed for generations and now often heard the traveling people to. The traditional task of maintaining old cultural traditions, copying manuscripts or collecting works of art was pursued in only a few families.

In the late 18th century, parts of the emerging educated middle class in large parts of Europe began to be interested in history, art and archeology. Some of them also had the financial means to collect artefacts , old books and manuscripts as well as art objects. It was around this time that interest in Irish culture revived. The political and cultural ties between Ireland and Great Britain were close and culminated in the 1800 Act of Union , the formal union of the two kingdoms previously ruled in personal union. It is therefore hardly surprising that many of these interested parties and enthusiasts were from England.

In 1785, the Royal Irish Academy was founded with the aim of promoting the study of the natural and human sciences and social sciences. Some learned societies, such as those for geography and archeology, were also founded around that time. A tentative start was made to research the rich archaeological monuments of the country, systematically and systematically to collect and partially evaluate manuscripts, to compile word lists and dictionaries for the Irish language and to work on similar fields. The direction of these activities, however, was by and large quite apolitical and detached from any aspirations for freedom of the Irish. In addition, for social and financial reasons, most of those involved in a union with Great Britain were interested Protestants , not Catholics .

Catholics were by the 1695 enacted criminal laws ( Penal Laws excluded) largely from social life. It was only with the Catholic emancipation in the 1820s and the politicization of broad masses brought about by Daniel O'Connell in the 1830s and 1840s that cultural awareness could reach a mass basis, which, however, quickly expressed itself politically. Ireland was considered the most political nation in the world at the time. In the following decades various political organizations were founded, such as the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1858 , the oriented Home Government Association (renamed the Home Rule League in 1873 , the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1882 ) and the like. v. a. founded.

These political movements were complemented (and reinforced) from the 1860s onwards by a return to their own culture and a growing pride in Irish traditions. From this emerged - after the pioneer, the Gaelic Society founded in 1806 , - u. a. the Irish Archeological Society and the Celtic Society , and finally the two Celtic Literary Societies in Dublin and York . From then on, more and more books on Irish subjects were published. a. Collections of Irish sagas.

High point at the turn of the century

One of the most influential cultural organizations founded in the decades before the turn of the century was the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), which was dedicated to promoting Irish sports such as hurling , camogie and Gaelic football , but which had enormous identifying power. However, the Gaelic League (Irish: Conradh na Gaeilge ) founded in 1893 was even more important . This had set itself the goal of promoting and spreading the Irish language. The League's numerous Irish courses were soon well attended and the organization itself became a fixture in the country's cultural life. Initially an almost apolitical organization, it soon became a catchment point for nationalists of all stripes. Due to the special situation in Ireland at that time, culture and politics could never really be separated.

The third influential institution was in 1899 under the name Irish Literary Theater , founded the Abbey Theater in Dublin. This was founded by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory and was run as a funding agency for modern Irish drama and (Anglo) Irish literature . Many newly created pieces (especially the owner himself) were premiered here.

The term Irish Renaissance is understood in a narrower sense to mean the literary aspect of these developments. As a relatively uniform literary period, the Irish Renaissance is mostly limited to the period from around 1890 to 1920. The overthrow of Parnell (1890) and the failure of efforts to achieve Home Rule and the unification of Ireland tended to lead to a process of disillusionment at the political level and to a strengthening of the commitment to a cultural unity in Ireland. At the center of this movement was the literary and theater scene in Dublin at the turn of the century, which was, however, still integrated into the political environment. At the end of the 19th and especially the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of lyrical, dramatic and prose works appeared, which represented Ireland in a previously unknown way.

Authors such as William Butler Yeats , Lady Augusta Gregory , Douglas Hyde and George William Russell ( Æ ) were faced with the difficult task of finding a new self-esteem and self-confidence and in a country which they believed had not only lost its independence but also its identity especially to give an idea of ​​yourself. Their methods therefore consisted primarily of creating an ideally and politically independent Ireland, in which, however, a fictional past that had never existed in this way was connected with a romanticized rural world in the west of Ireland.

Many of the texts were set in a pseudo-mythological past that often had little to do with the Old and Middle Irish sagas, since the authors mostly could only fall back on more or less watered down folkloric versions. Even in the texts embedded in the present, the idea was often placed above reality. The rather harsh and poor everyday life of the rural population was mostly ignored, including all existing class differences, and the focus was instead on the inner harmony and the spiritual purity of the Irish farmers and fishermen. In the work of William Butler Yeats in particular, however, there are also clear political time references, for example in the poem Easter 1916 .

As a comparatively closed literary movement and unified literary period in the narrower sense, the Irish Renaissance ended with the conclusion of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the establishment of the Irish Free State (1921-1922), as the country's cultural situation changed fundamentally after the end of the struggle for independence. In literary history, this point in time is usually understood as the beginning of the more recent Anglo-Irish literature.

Nevertheless, the Irish Renaissance remained effective as an ideological or cultural movement in Ireland, especially through personalities such as Douglas Hydes and Éamon de Valeras, until the 1950s. Despite the abandonment of this kind of internal emigration since the 1960s, much of this can still be felt today.

But not all Irish writers and poets of the time followed this return to ostensibly traditional values. John Millington Synge , Seán O'Casey and George Bernard Shaw, for example, mainly showed the rather unromantic, perhaps more realistic sides of Ireland (Synge) or were strongly oriented towards international literature (Shaw, O'Casey). Oscar Wilde tried to undermine the image of the semi-ridiculous " stage Irishman ", which is well-known from countless stage plays , by often adopting the point of view of the English and trying to correct the image in this way.

Two next-generation poets broke new ground, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett . Both emigrated to the European continent as young men and were influenced early on by the literary avant-garde there . While Beckett largely excluded the subject of Ireland from his texts, Joyce remained closely connected to his little-loved homeland throughout her life. Each of his books also offers very specific insights into Irish society in the first two decades of the 20th century. In hindsight, these two authors left a much more enduring and undisputed literary legacy than either Yeats or Lady Gregory. In Ireland in the first half of the century, however, most readers and critics considered them to be smaller or even to be rejected entirely.

Irish Gaelic or Anglo Irish?

Almost all of the poets of the Irish Renaissance wrote exclusively in English . This is in stark contrast to the efforts of the Gaelic League, for example, to restore the Irish language as a national and everyday language. Most of those involved, however, came from urban and often Protestant origins. Few of them had close contact with the mostly English-speaking, simple people in the country. The Irish language was as foreign to them as it was to most English. Feeling Irish, thinking Irish, and writing Irish as they intended had little to do with the Irish language by the end of the 19th century. The literary scene increasingly separated from the very active language movement.

Nevertheless, the first works of modern Irish-language literature emerged shortly after the turn of the century. This literature was a conscious re-creation of the Irish language movement and has been actively promoted financially and socially since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 until today. As early as 1904, Séadna , a kind of Faust version of Father Peadar Ua Laoghaire , was the first literary and linguistically influential novel in modern Irish-language literature. In 1910 Pádraic Ó Conaire published the novel Deoraidheacht ("Exile"), which describes life in exile in England and adheres to a consistently modern style. But modernity took a few decades before it could really find its way into Irish-language literature. It was not until Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970) and various authors from the 1960s and 1970s onwards that Irish literature became a small but “normal” international literature.

In any case, the Irish renaissance was multifaceted, and it was also divided on the question of language. Apparently there was little personal contact between authors of the two languages, but at least the English-language works were received by Irish-speaking authors. However, both areas proved extremely fruitful for subsequent Irish literature.

National or international?

Much of the early participants in this "movement" focused on providing Ireland with self-image and self-confidence. To this end, the nation should be told what and who it was and where it came from. Often the explanation was more a dream than a mirror, but this look inward dominated the cultural self-image well beyond the middle of the 20th century.

For authors like Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey, Ó Conaire and Ó Cadhain, who did not accept these limitations, it was often very difficult or even impossible to establish themselves in Ireland with more open-minded and modern approaches and ideas. Those who wrote in English often enjoyed more fame and recognition abroad than in Ireland.

In making this assessment, however, it should be remembered that Yeats, Lady Gregory, Hyde, and others faced the task of creating something entirely new in the late 19th century. Even if from today's perspective a lot seems (pseudo-) romantic and irrational, these authors have laid the foundation for modern Irish literature. It is possible that it was their books that created the prerequisite that Joyce, Beckett and later Austin Clarke or Denis Devlin could so consciously break away from this type of late romanticism and tread internationally oriented paths.

Waning in movement

After the Irish movement, especially the Gaelic League, had an enormous number of members in the first decade of the 20th century or was able to rely on broad support, this subsided quite soon after independence was achieved in 1922. Although the Irish language was officially installed as the new state's first language, the number of native speakers could never be increased. However, with the introduction of compulsory subjects in state schools, Irish became stronger as a second language than ever before.

However, the quantity and quality of Irish literature in both English and Irish has not deteriorated. The enormous impetus from the “Renaissance movement” has left its mark on Ireland to this day. The country is known for its numerous Nobel Prize winners in literature as well as for the wide recognition that most writers and poets enjoy in public life . Irish-language literature has had higher publication numbers than ever since the 1970s.

See also

• Celtic ideology

Important works

• William Carleton , Collected Works , 1854
• William Butler Yeats , Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry , 1888
• William Butler Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems , 1889
• William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight , 1893
• Oscar Wilde , The Importance of Being Earnest , 1895
• Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol , 1899
• William Butler Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan , 1902
• Lady Gregory , Poets and Dreamers , 1903
• Peadar Ua Laoghaire , Séadna , 1904
• George Bernard Shaw , John Bull's Other Island , 1907
• William Butler Yeats, The Green Helmet and Other Poems , 1910
• Pádraic Ó Conaire , Deoraidheacht , 1910
• Lady Gregory, Irish Folk History Plays , 1912
• George William Russell , Collected Poems , 1913
• George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion , 1914
• James Joyce , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , 1916
• Æ (George Russell), Candle of Vision , 1918
• William Butler Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer , 1921
• James Joyce, Ulysses , 1922
• Seán O'Casey , The Shadow of a Gunman , 1923
• Sean O'Casey, Juno and the Paycock , 1924
• Sean O'Casey, The Silver Tassie , 1929
• Samuel Beckett , Murphy , 1938
• Brian O'Nolan , At Swim-two-Birds , 1939
• Máirtín Ó Cadhain , An Braon Broghach , 1948
• Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Cré na Cille , 1949
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot , 1952
• Samuel Beckett, Endgame , 1958

Individual evidence

1. ^ Francis Stewart Leland Lyons: Ireland since the famine . Fontana Press, London, 10th ed. 1987. ISBN 0-00-686005-2 ; therein the chapter The Battle of Two Civilizations , pp. 224–246.
2. ^ Francis Stewart Leland Lyons: Ireland since the famine . 10th ed. 1987. p. 225.
3. ^ Francis Stewart Leland Lyons: Ireland since the famine . 10th ed. 1987. p. 247.
4. ^ Francis Stewart Leland Lyons: Ireland since the famine . 10th ed. 1987. pp. 234-236.
5. ↑ Cf. Heinz Kosok: History of Anglo-Irish Literature . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 190, ISBN 3-503-03004-2 , pp. 143f.
6. ↑ Cf. Heinz Kosok: History of Anglo-Irish Literature . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 190, ISBN 3-503-03004-2 , p. 144.