Considered from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, when plays by Irish writers can be seen on stages from Los Angeles to Warsaw, it is difficult to imagine Irish culture without the theatre. However, if we turn back to the first major histories of the Irish theatre, published in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, we find them troubled by an awareness that the theatre does not fit easily into the prevailing definitions of Irish culture.

This problem is best defined by one of the foundational works of Irish theatre history, Joseph CooperWalker’s ‘An Historical Essay on the Irish Stage’, published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1788.Walker was a respected antiquarian who had published his ‘Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards’ two years earlier. He was one of a number of antiquarians and historians of the period who sought to recover indigenous forms of Irish architecture, music, poetry, graphic design, sports, clothing and civil law. In all of these areas, the ancient Irish past seemed to be an almost inexhaustible source, connecting the emerging modern nation with an authenticating history. ‘Can that nation be deemed barbarous in which learning shared the honours next to royalty?’ asks Walker in one of the more passionate moments in his ‘Memoirs of the Irish Bards’. ‘Read this, ye polished nations of the earth, and blush!’1 However, when Walker and his contemporaries looked for traces of theatre in Irish antiquity, they found nothing. ‘It is very extraordinary that we cannot discover any vestiges of the Drama amongst the remains of the Irish Bards’, comments Walker. ‘If the Stage ever existed in Ireland previous to the middle ages, like the “baseless fabric of a vision” it has melted into air, leaving not a trace behind.’

The constitutional union of 1800 was an extreme political formula. It was pursued with ruthless energy; it ultimately disappointed its architects. Yet the Union provided a constitutional framework for Ireland for 120 years, and has survived in a truncated form within Northern Ireland since 1920. The Belfast Agreement of 1998, which is sometimes viewed as a 'renegotiation' of the Union, has brought into focus the issue of its survival. More than ever, there is a need to understand not only why the original Union failed in 1920-21, but also how and why it lasted for over a century. More than ever there is a need to illuminate some of the explanations for the survival of the British state in nineteenth-century Ireland and beyond.

Yet even though the Union was a central feature of political life in the nineteenth century modern Irish historians have some how evaded the question of its survival. At one level the reason for this is not hard to locate: modern Irish political historiography remains dominated by the Home Rule and revolutionary era; and it is hard to escape the impression that a good deal of Irish history writing has, as its ultimate destination, the political settlements of the early 1920s, when the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland were each established. Of course this is an entirely unexceptional emphasis, given the enormous and lasting significance which the revolutionary and Ulster Unionist movements possessed. It is also entirely reasonable that Irish historians should emphasise the ultimate failure of the Union in the twenty-six counties. But it is possible that this reasonableness has created a paradox – that many Irish historians have effectively dedicated themselves to explaining the death of a settlement which (whatever the quality of its life) clung on for a remarkable length of time.

Introduction

The history of the visual arts in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the ongoing story of the relationship between a metropolitan culture (London) and a smaller, less economically sustainable environment (Dublin). The production of art is an expensive activity. Although all cultural media need patronage and financial assistance, the visual arts have the added burden of needing materials, be it oils and canvases or marble blocks or the latest innovations in information technology, so as to begin the process of visual communication. Finally, it needs forms of display to make it all accessible to an audience, be it private or public. For much of the period under discussion, 1800-2000, Ireland was very often not in a position to greatly assist its visual artists. In many ways an account of the visual arts in relation to Ireland in the modern period is a story of talent exported to London and in more recent times to other European cities and also to New York. In the nineteenth century London was the metropolis of empire while in the twentieth century it and other international locations have become convenient sites for artistic training, exhibition and sales. That economic dependency is vital to an understanding of the progress of the visual arts over the last two hundred years.

The nineteenth century

One of the key facts in discussing pre-twentieth-century Irish art is the dominant position of the British School. No native-born artists have had the cultural effect that John Constable, J. M. W. Turner or David Wilkie had in their native England or Scotland, while at the same time most prominent Irish artists of the period – from James Barry who died in 1806 to Sir John Lavery who died in 1941 – are still staunchly included in most reference books as British artists. The problem lies with the export of talent to London and the economic impossibility of making a living in Dublin or Ireland in general.

The aim of this Companion is to introduce readers to modern Irish culture in all its complexity and variety. Before moving into detailed cultural analysis, however, the opening chapter invites readers to consider the historical and theoretical meanings of our framing concept: modern Ireland. What does modernity mean for Ireland? How can we conceptualise the modern culture of a country and a people with two languages, divided since the early twentieth century into two states? Officially incorporated into the United Kingdom with the Act of Union in 1800, Ireland in the nineteenth century was a constituent element of a sprawling empire of global reach. Union with Britain survives into the twenty-first century in the shape of the political border dividing Northern Ireland from the Republic. And yet the long history of Irish migration and diaspora means that even the divided island - the basic geopolitical unit - cannot be taken for granted as the sole sphere of modern Irish culture.

The nowadays much-debated terms terms ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’ also require consideration. For a long time, these words were associated with the radical intellectual iconoclasm of the Enlightenment and with the transformational dynamism of capitalism. The revolutionary utopianism of feminism, socialism and communism sprang from such quintessentially Enlightenment beliefs as human rights and global justice and equality: all such claims expressed in terms of a cry for the optimal extension of the modern. At the start of the new millennium, however, calls for the extension of modernisation are more likely to hinder than to abet campaigns for social justice or the dream of a better world beyond capitalism.

While the attempt to recover or revive a traditional native culture was a key element of Irish cultural nationalism since the late eighteenth century, the moment of the so-called Celtic Revival, at around the turn of the twentieth century, remains distinctive and significant for a number of reasons.

In no other period has Ireland produced so many writers of such extraordinary quality. Moreover, the reputations and achievements of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge are inextricably bound up with the revivalist features of their Irish subject matter, and those of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are at least in part moulded by their rejection of the aesthetics and politics of the revival. The contemporary ‘branding’ of the Irish cultural heritage continues to exploit the fame of these literary stars. The works of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, of course, are all also central to the history of European modernism. Indeed, it could be argued that this unique instance of a modernist movement in a colonial setting presents an important challenge to theorists of modernism; certainly, this literature demands from its critics a nuanced understanding of modernity in relation to Irish history.

Introduction

The historical development of a sporting culture in Ireland reflects the island's political and cultural history as a whole. It is a story of accommodation and resistance, and of an uneasy relationship between these attitudes, dialectically intertwined in Irish history. As Mike Cronin observes, 'until there is only one idea of Irish nationalism, and a singular and commonly shared expression of identity, then sport will continue to reflect the multifaceted and ever changing nature of Irishness'. Not only has sport in Ireland been greatly affected by economic and political change, it has also impacted both directly and indirectly on Irish society. It is worth noting, however, that the story of Irish sport as a cultural practice is to a large extent his/story. As in other areas of public life, women have had a relatively low profile in the sporting world. Much has changed since the 1960s, and yet Irish sport remains a preserve of gender inequality: men run the games, are the best rewarded participants, make up the bulk of sporting audiences and receive most publicity from the sporting media.

Sport matters to the Irish people, and in particular to Irish men. They play it, read about it, watch it and speak about it to a degree that, whilst by no means unique, certainly suggests that it is an aspect of Irish cultural life deserving of notice. The extent to which Irish soccer captain Roy Keane’s departure from the World Cup Finals in 2002 and his criticisms of association football’s ruling body in the Irish Republic, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), held virtually the entire nation in thrall is clear evidence of sport’s ability to supersede almost all other domestic and international matters.

Introduction

Irish migration in the nineteenth century is one of the most significant movements of population in modern European history, in terms of the total number of people involved and the proportion migrating. Between 1801 and 1921 (the period of Union with Britain), approximately 8 million people left Ireland. Ireland's contribution to the outflow of approximately 44 million people from Europe between 1821 and 1914 was the largest of any other country, relative to the size of the island's population. In the twentieth century, outward migration continued; but it was marked by two periods of very heavy out-migration, the 1950s and the second half of the 1980s, and by two periods of net inward migration, the 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. These patterns reached a point in Ireland such that, for all but the eldest son and sometimes daughter, emigration was a life event as 'normal' as leaving school or getting married. Altogether in the period 1949-89 800,000 people left Ireland. There are two consequences following this sustained emigration over the past two centuries. One is that at any one time a significant proportion of people alive who were born in Ireland were living abroad. The second is that there are many millions of people across the globe who are of Irish descent and who can claim an Irish heritage and identity should they so wish.

Introduction

This chapter surveys current and past definitions and theories of Irish folklore. It relates our understanding of folklore and folklife to the ways in which these knowledges have developed and become institutionalised and argues for the special place of folklore studies in our understanding of Irish subaltern culture more generally.

In practice, ‘folk culture’ usually distinguishes those aspects of popular culture which have long been established in agrarian society and are associated with a particular way of life – especially that of peasants – from more recent and non-rural forms. The latter, of course, may be traditional too, but are usually seen as being a product of modern rather than traditional society. Folk culture in another sense refers to an ideal of authenticity, as in the attribution by the Romantic thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau to nature of various social phenomena supposedly uncorrupted by culture: the ‘noble savage’ and then the peasant challenged the decadence of aristocratic society. Johann Gottfried von Herder explicitly contrasted natural writing (Naturpoesie) with the artifice of civilisation (Kunstdichtung). Ireland in the same period sawa heated Irish controversy over James Macpherson’s appropriation of the common Gaelic Ossianic poems. The Ossian poems prefigured European romanticism with their wild native energy. To Herder these poems, along with Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) by Bishop Percy (a friend and mentor to the pioneering editor and translator of Irish poetry, Charlotte Brooke), were the epitome of Naturpoesie.

To give an account of poetry in modern Ireland is not an entirely straightforward matter, for several reasons. To begin with the most obvious, using the title 'Poetry in Ireland' rather than 'Irish Poetry' sidesteps a vital issue. Since the Middle Ages, poetry has been written on the island in both Irish and English. Recently there has been some dispute over whether the poetry in the two languages can sensibly be seen as a single entity at all, as 'Irish Poetry'. The classic claim in favour of such a shared poetic tradition was made by Thomas Kinsella, both in his book The Dual Tradition, and in the introduction to his New Oxford Book of Irish Verse in 1986:

The wrongs of woman

In the period of the European Enlightenment, a modern feminist discourse emerged out of complimentary concerns with what the English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, named 'the wrongs of woman' and 'the rights of women'. There were earlier speculations on the possibility that women might constitute a class of people who suffer, and may demand rights, but there was no systematic attempt to theorise the position of women in Irish society - with a view to bringing about a change in that position - before the mid-eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century the wrongs of which women were conscious included unequal access to education, vulnerability to domestic violence and to sexual violence from family and strangers, limited rights of property and inheritance and exclusion from all levels of government and the judiciary. The groundswell of complaint about the wrongs suffered by women in Ireland tended to be particular and dispersed in this early period. Women and men who complained about specific aspects of women's lives did not couch those complaints within a thorough analysis of an Irish class system or social contract.

The absence of an overarching narrative immediately draws attention to perhaps the single greatest problem facing an historian of feminism in Ireland, which is the question as to whether the evolution of feminist discourses in Irish and in English constitute separate discourses and separate development. The large majority of Irish women were Irish-speaking. Literary sources from eighteenth-century Ireland suggest that there was some consciousness of a potential war between the sexes: men and women wanted different things from their lives and complained about one another as groups.

Music in Ireland in the modern period reflected the changing socioeconomic strata of the society in which it was produced and consumed. Professional performances by popular European composers were put on in theatres for well-off audiences. A burgeoning print culture produced broadsides and pamphlets of songs and ballads disseminating radical republican ideas, coexisting with an older, Irish-language tradition, where anonymous love songs, drinking songs, laments and other songs by literate poets abounded. Professional traditional musicians, harpers, fiddlers and pipers plied their trades and tailored their repertoires to suit their patrons, so that, depending on opportunity, their playing could range across the available gamut of contemporary musical genres. This chapter shows how an outline of the changing political climate is crucial for an understanding of the emergence of a canon of 'Irish music' as a distinct category. Developments in the formation of that canon, marking changing material realities and cultural tastes will also be discussed, and some account will be given of the enduring controversies that are integral to the ways in which 'Irish music' has been imagined.

Our modern understanding of Irish music begins in Scotland. From the mid-eighteenth century, James Macpherson’s ‘epics’, loosely based on Gaelic heroic poetry, centring upon the legendary hero Ossian (or Oisín), enjoyed huge success, part of a growing and fashionable interest in the culture of the marginalised ‘Celtic’ periphery. These poems were popular in a climate marked by the effective defeat of the Jacobite forces at Culloden in 1746, and rode a wave of romanticism for a cause which had recently been a source of real danger to the peace and stability of the existing polity of the islands.

In 1948 Auden began summering in Italy, partly because he wanted to write a different kind of poetry from the kind he had been writing in America. In 1958 he began summering in Austria, partly because he wanted to write a different kind of poetry from the kind he had been writing in Italy. From his arrival in New York in 1939 until he left for his first Italian journey in April 1948, his poems had focused on the existential crises of the inner life. A comment he later made about Søren Kierkegaard could apply with little exaggeration to his own work in the 1940s: 'a planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood' (Pilgrims, p. 42). The poems he wrote after he arrived in Italy for the first time celebrate human flesh, not for its beauty, in which Auden now takes almost no interest, but for its ordinariness. And because they celebrate human flesh they also mourn over human blood.

Durées and family resemblances of Modernism

As literary terms, modernismo and modernista entered into the language of writers, artists, and critics at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is commonly believed that Rubén Darío, in 1888, was the first to speak of modernismo. It was also at the fin de siècle that a significant number of Spanish poets and novelists renewed Spanish letters by producing literary texts deeply influenced by Parnassianism, Symbolism, Pre-Raphaelitism, and decadentism. Some literary critics of that period and many scholars thenceforth have placed this heterogeneous group of innovative writers and their texts under the labels of modernismo and modernista.

Although many contemporary scholars take for granted that modernismo was a syncretic literary movement, at the turn of the century it was still unclear just what modernismo was. In an article published as early as 1901, José María Nogués complained that modernismo had become an omnibus term, likening it to a prism: all optical illusion with no substance. Writers and critics were so baffled that in 1907, the editors of the journal El Nuevo Mercurio (“The New Mercury”) decided to conduct a survey aimed at reining in a term as polysemic as modernismo. Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno, Eduardo Chávarri, Ramiro de Maeztu, Ernesto Bark, and Manuel Machado, among many others, defined modernismo from very different perspectives and at times in contradictory ways. There has never been complete agreement on the characteristics, origins, or time period of modernismo. In describing modernismo, the aforementioned critics, and others, observed any number of the following: modernismo’s aestheticism and syncretism; its employment of symbolist, decadent, and/or Parnassian techniques and themes; its renewal of and attention to literary form; its search for new modes of expression; modernismo as the culture and literature of the modern age; its subversive and oppositional attitude toward the establishment; modernismo as the essence of literature itself (an idea developed years later by Paul de Man); and modernismo as a synonym of modernity.

Each term used to describe the period in which Spain saw a burgeoning of new ideas and new literary forms that helped create a brilliant flowering of prose, poetry, and drama brings with it a distinct view of how that period is to be conceptualized and evaluated. The “Golden Age” refers now by common consent to the literature of both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but critics in previous centuries, excluding on aesthetic grounds seventeenth-century literature from the canon of truly “great” national literature, applied the term only to the sixteenth. Applied now to both centuries it suggests a unified period, not uncoincidentally conterminous with Habsburg rule in Spain (1516–1700), in which differences are outweighed by similarities, the latter often amounting simply to an uncritical notion of literary “greatness” thought applicable to both centuries. In contrast, the terms “Renaissance” and “Baroque” suggest a view of Golden Age literature in which, due to changing intellectual, cultural, and political factors, each century has its own characteristic literary and intellectual ethos. This is what will be argued here, but such a view is especially contentious to those who see the Baroque as a problematic label precisely because, as an anachronistic term developed initially to describe the visual arts, there is little consensus as to its meaning. Its value outweighs the problems inherent in its usage, however, for it not only serves to distinguish seventeenth-century culture from that of the preceding century, but links Spain very broadly to international trends, thereby countering what has long been a forceful element in Spanish historiography, namely the view of Golden Age Spain as intellectually and culturally isolated.

On 19 January 1939, the Champlain left Southampton for New York, with Auden aboard. In England, where national insecurity lingered corrosively despite reassurances purchased at Munich in September, Auden's departure was bound to be construed negatively. The impending European war meant that Auden's journey took on the character of betrayal in the public mind. To the 'either-ors', 'the mongrel-halves' (NYL, line 821) or 'the Lords of Limit' who set 'a tabu 'twixt left and right' (EA, p.115), there were no shades of motive or meaning, and 'facts' were harder when, paradoxically, life could be made to take on the bold lineaments of myth.

As a product of the twenties and thirties – a period, as Robin Skelton pointed out almost forty years ago, unusually prone to self-mythologising – Auden did not distance himself from the myth-making impulse. His early poems are set in a world suffused with threat and mysterious urgency, yet oddly detached from history, and are in that sense mythic. Yet their preoccupation with liminality and transactions across borders made the secondary world of his imagination into an 'antimythological myth', to use his phrase from 'In Praise of Limestone'. In the decade before his departure for America, Auden certainly contributed in some measure to the discourse of the Lords of Limit and to the construction of the very myths according to which in 1939 he found himself alleged a traitor.

The Generation of 1927 in Franco’s Spain

Only three ranking members of the Generation of 1927 remained in Spain at the end of the Civil War: Dámaso Alonso (1898–1990), Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984), and Gerardo Diego (1896–1987).

In the pre-War period Alonso had gained respect and notoriety as a historian, a philologist, and the scholarly promoter of the tercentennial commemoration of Góngora’s death in 1927. Yet, with his 1944 book Hijos de la ira (“Children of Wrath”), Alonso positioned himself as the leading figure in the movement to “rehumanize” poetry, a tendency which emerged in the years immediately after the Spanish Civil War. This watershed collection deviates from the norms of Garcilasian Neoclassicism, fusing elements of Surrealist “humanization” with the “impurity” of Neruda and Vallejo, and approximating an incipient mode of social poetry, particularly in its treatment of existential anguish and religious distress. The impact of Hijos de la ira is fueled by its disquieting imagery, by its Expressionist language culled from the semantic fields of the degraded, the violent, and the repugnant, and by the fiery rhythm of its longish lines. At its core, the book is rooted in an acknowledgment of the injustice and hostile absurdity of reality. The collection presents man not merely as a victim of this reality, but, moreover, as a subject who has come to identify with – and even to see himself as a part of – Nature’s intrinsic wrath. Faced with this human tragedy, Alonso appeals to the figure of an indifferent God as he poses unanswerable, yet inevitable, questions concerning the meaning of life, solitude, and death.

'Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: “memorable speech”', W. H. Auden wrote in the Introduction to his 1935 anthology, The Poet's Tongue (Poet's Tongue, p. v). Auden is one of the few modern poets whose words inhabit the popular memory. Long before the recitation of 'Funeral Blues' in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, many of his phrases had passed into common use. His characterisation in 'September 1, 1939' of the 1930s as a 'low dishonest decade' has become definitive and ubiquitous, invoked even in quarters not normally associated with high literacy. Dan Quayle, for example, announcing his 1999 Presidential candidacy, applied it to the Clinton years. This poem alone has supplied titles for countless books, including studies of the economic origins of World War II (A Low Dishonest Decade), Soviet espionage (The Haunted Wood), the history of saloons (Faces Along the Bar) and a play about AIDS (The Normal Heart). Such diverse co-options indicate the range of reference Auden can pack into a single poem.

Auden focused consistently on the opportunities for wider discourse and immediate emotional impact offered by various kinds of performance. He started writing his first dramatic script on leaving Oxford at the age of twenty-one, and was collaborating on an operatic libretto in 1973, the year of his death. There was hardly a year when Auden was not working on some kind of performance text. In addition to stage plays and libretti, he experimented with cabaret, liturgical drama, Agitprop, pageant and declamatory verses, the masque and (rejected) lyrics for the musical comedy, 'The Man of La Mancha' (1963). As new forms of media appeared he immediately adopted them, writing radio plays, scripts for early documentary films and movie scenarios.

This cultivation of a public poetic voice paralleled T. S. Eliot, who also turned to drama to reach a wider, more popular audience, and experimented with ritual theatre. Whereas Eliot gave up the stage after The Elder Statesman in 1958, Auden’s involvement lasted throughout his life. Although he never managed to write anything as truly popular as Eliot’s ritualised drama of martyrdom, Murder in the Cathedral, Auden maintained his poetic agenda by turning in his later years to opera.

The appeal to classicizing aesthetic principles which characterized the reformist tendency of high culture in eighteenth-century Spain is best understood as a reaction to the dominant literary mode inherited from the previous century. In drama, poetry, and prose writing the renewed emphasis on clarity of communication, respect for generic conventions, and the moral role of literature was thought best exemplified in the tradition deriving from Aristotle and Horace, and elaborated by European, including Spanish, theorists from the sixteenth century onwards.

In poetry the sixteenth-century classicism of Garcilaso, Boscán, Luis de León, and Herrera, and their successors the Argensolas, Esquilache, and Rebolledo, was widely admired, providing models to be imitated by eighteenth-century classicizers. Although printed texts of these predecessors were uncommon until their recuperation in new editions in the second half of the century, the works furnished models of a tradition identified with the revered poets of Augustan Rome (Horace, Ovid, Virgil). Authors such as Quevedo and Góngora, who sometimes abandoned classical clarity in works exploiting the intellectually complex metaphorical play of conceptismo and the erudite allusions of the culterano style, were nevertheless praised for compositions which coincided with classicism. The rhetoric of conceptismo still formed the mainstay of popular versifying, whose reliance on arguably unsubtle wordplay provoked condemnation by classicizers.