Celtic Revival
As Irish Renaissance (English Irish Renaissance, also Irish Revival or falsely Celtic Revival, Celtic Dawn, Irish Athbheochan Cheilteach ) is a variety of endeavors, movements and individuals together, the end of the 19th century and early 20th century in the broadest sense had a revival of Irish identity and culture of the destination.
Origins
After 1607 ( Flight of the Earls ) the remains of the Irish nobility were mostly fled the country, the traditional Irish- Gaelic culture and art had no social and political base more. The Irish-language literature flattened with few exceptions rapidly, poets and singers were unemployed for generations and now often belonged to the traveling people to. Only in a few families of the traditional task has been pursued to maintain ancient cultural traditions, to copy manuscripts or to collect artifacts.
In the late 18th century, parts of the emerging educated middle class began to be interested in much of Europe for history, art and archeology. Some of them also were the financial ability to collect artifacts, old books and manuscripts and art objects available. At this time, awoke the interest in Irish culture again. The political and cultural relations between Ireland and Britain were narrow and culminated in the 1800 Act of Union, the formal unification of the two previously ruled in personal union kingdoms. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that many of these interested parties and enthusiasts from England came.
In 1785 the Royal Irish Academy was founded with the aim to promote the study of natural sciences and the humanities and the social sciences. Some learned societies, such as in geography and archeology were about at that time also founded. Timid began to explore the rich natural monuments in the country, to collect manuscripts deliberately and systematically and partially evaluate, create word lists and dictionaries for the Irish language and to process similar fields. The alignment of these activities was, on the whole, however, entirely apolitical and independently of any emancipatory aspirations of the Irish. In addition, for social and financial reasons, most participants interested in a union with Great Britain Protestants, not Catholics.
Catholics had been largely excluded from social life by the 1695 enacted criminal laws ( Penal Laws ). Only with the Catholic emancipation in the 1820s and the changes introduced under Daniel O'Connell politicization broad masses of the people in the 1830s and 1840s was a cultural awareness to reach a mass base, but then very quickly expressed politically. Ireland was at that time as most political nation in the world. In the following decades, various political organizations were founded in 1858 as the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood ( IRB), 1870, the Home uva -oriented Government Association ( 1873 Home Rule League, 1882 in Irish Parliamentary Party renamed) founded. From the 1860s also increasingly culturally oriented activities are then recorded, often in the form of book publications on Irish themes.
Peak around the turn of the century
One of the most influential cultural organizations that were established in the last decades before the turn of the century, was the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), the promotion of Irish sports such as Hurling, Camogie and Gaelic Football devoted himself, however, had an enormous power of identification. However, was even more important in 1893, founded the Gaelic League ( Irish: Conradh na Gaeilge ). This is the promotion and dissemination of the Irish language had set a goal. The many Irish courses of the League were well attended and soon became the organization a permanent fixture in the cultural life of the country. Initially, however, an almost non-political organization, it soon became the catch-all for nationalists of all stripes. Due to the special situation in Ireland at the time of culture and politics were never really separate.
The third influential institution was founded in 1899 under the name of the Irish Literary Theatre Abbey Theatre in Dublin. This was founded by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory and performed as a promotional institution for the modern Irish drama and the ( Anglo- ) Irish literature. Many pieces of newly formed (especially by the owner ) had their world premiere here.
The term Irish Renaissance is understood in the narrow sense of the literary aspect of these developments. In the center of which stood all the literary and theater scene in Dublin turn of the century, which was however firmly embedded in the political environment. End of the 19th and especially early 20th century appeared a large amount of lyrical, dramatic and prose works that represented Ireland in hitherto unknown ways.
Authors such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, Douglas Hyde and George William Russell ( Æ) were faced with the difficult task of a country that had lost not only its independence but also its identity in their view, a new self- esteem and self -confidence and in particular, to give an idea of yourself. Therefore your methods mainly consisted of creating a morally and politically independent Ireland, but in which a fictional past that had so never existed, was connected to a romanticized rural world in the west of Ireland.
Many of the texts were located in a pseudomythologischen past, which often had to do with the Old and Middle Irish sagas little, because the authors could usually only rely on more or less diluted folkloric versions. Also in the embedded in the present text, the idea was often asked about the reality. The rather harsh and miserable life of the rural population was mostly together with all existing class differences disappear and set the concentration for the inner harmony and the spiritual purity of the Irish farmers and fishermen. Especially in the work of William Butler Yeats, there are also significant political time references, such as in the poem Easter 1916.
The ideology of this movement continued in Ireland and especially about the personalities of Douglas Hyde and Eamon de Valera's up in the 1950s by. Despite the move away from this kind of inner emigration since the 1960s is much to feel it until today.
However, not all Irish writers and poets of the time followed this return to supposedly traditional values . John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey and George Bernard Shaw, for example, showed especially the rather unromantic, perhaps more realistic side of Ireland ( Synge ) or oriented strongly to the international literature ( Shaw, O'Casey ). Oscar Wilde was trying to undermine the all too familiar mainly from countless stage productions image of the semi- ridiculous " theater - Irish" (stage Irishman ) by looking often take the perspective of the English, and to correct the image in this way he.
Two poets of the next generation were entirely new ways, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Both emigrated as young men to the European continent and settled early influence of the local literary avant-garde. While Beckett, however, the issue largely Ireland ausklammerte from his texts, Joyce remained all his life his little beloved homeland closely linked. Each book also provides very specific insights into Irish society in the first two decades of the 20th century. In retrospect, these two authors left a much more sustainable and unumstritteneres literary heritage as Yeats and Lady Gregory. In the first half of the century, however, they were in Ireland to most readers and critics as smaller sizes or even completely reject.
Irish Gaelic or Anglo -Irish?
Almost all the poets that are attributed to the Irish Renaissance, wrote exclusively in English. This is in stark contrast to the efforts about the Gaelic League to restore the Irish language as the national language and everyday life. However, the origin of most of the participants was often urban and Protestant. Few had close contacts with the also mostly English-speaking, common people in the country. The Irish language was as foreign to them as the medium most Englishmen. Feeling Irish, Irish to think and write Irish, as they intended it, had late 19th century to do with the Irish language only slightly. The literary scene increasingly separated from the very active language movement.
However, shortly after the turn of the century the first works of modern literature irischsprachiger emerged. This literature was a deliberate creation of the Irish language movement and is promoted since the establishment of the Irish Free State from 1922 to today financially and socially active. In 1904 appeared with Séadna, a sort of thumb version of Father Peadar Ua Laoghaire, the first literary and linguistic influential novel of the modern Irish-language literature. Pádraic Ó Conaire published in 1910 the novel Deoraidheacht ( " exile "), which describes life in exile in England and thereby maintains a consistently modern style. But needed the Modern a few decades, until she could really keep moving into the Irish-language literature. Only with Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906-1970) and various authors from the 1960s and 1970s, the Irish literature to a small but "normal" international literature.
The Irish Renaissance was much shape anyway, even in the languages it was divided. Between authors of the two languages , there were apparently a few personal contacts, but at least the English-language works of Irish-speaking writers were read. However, both areas proved to be extremely fruitful for the subsequent Irish literature.
National or international?
Much of the early participants of this "movement" focused on the task to provide Ireland with a self-image and self- confidence. For this, the nation should be told what and who she was, where she came from. It was often served to explain a dream rather than a mirror image, but this look inward dominated the cultural self- understanding far beyond the middle of the 20 th century.
For authors such as Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey, Ó Conaire and Ó Cadhain who do not were getting to these limitations, it was often very difficult or even impossible to enforce with more cosmopolitan and modern approaches and ideas in Ireland. The writing in English among them learned abroad often more fame and recognition than in Ireland.
However, this assessment should not be forgotten that Yeats, Lady Gregory, Hyde and others in the late 19th century before the self-imposed task were to create something entirely new. Although from today's perspective, many ( pseudo-) is romantic and irrational, these authors have laid the foundations for the modern Irish literature. You may only have their books laid the foundations that Joyce, Beckett, and later Austin Clarke and Denis Devlin so consciously distinguish themselves from this kind of late Romanticism and internationally oriented routes could tread.
Waning of the movement
After the Irish movement, especially the Gaelic League in the first decade of the 20th century could produce enormous membership and build broad support, this subsided after the independence in 1922 reached quite soon from. The Irish language was indeed installed as the official first language of the new state, but the number of native speakers could never be increased. However, the Irish was as strong as ever as a second language through the introduction of the compulsory subject in state schools.
The quantity and quality of Irish Literature in English as in Irish is not abated. The enormous impetus by the " Renaissance movement " leaves its mark to this day in Ireland. The country is well known as for the broad recognition that enjoy most writers and poets in public life for its many Nobel Prize for Literature. The Irish-language literature since the 1970s has such a high number of publications on like never before.