Celtic and Irish Revival

Introduction

The phrase Celtic Revival describes past movements in literature, the arts, and social practices in which legends, poetry, art, and spirituality of a distinctive kind were revived. Writers and artists identified these with the Celtic people in parts of pre-Christian and early Christian Europe. The most significant Celtic Revival took place in Ireland toward the end of the 19th century and into the first two decades of the 20th century. It is commonly referred to as the Irish Revival, though it has also been considered a Celtic revival in Ireland that had associations with revival movements in Scotland, Wales, the English regions, and Brittany. The Irish Revival was felt most strongly in literature, drama, and the Irish language. It was also evident in art, design, music, and sport. The political and economic features of the Irish Revival were complex. The influence of militant nationalism was strong, yet unionist, Home Rule nationalist, socialist, and feminist political views were held by different figures involved in the Irish Revival across a range of different groups and activities. Much academic scholarship concerned with Celtic Revival has focused on the literary and dramatic movement in Ireland, producing as it did three of the most important international literary figures of the 20th century—W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey. The term Celtic Revival, however, was contested by some cultural activists in Ireland. During the Irish Revival, some regarded the notion of “Celtic” Revival as softening the national “Irish” nature of the movement, implying affinities with the ancient inheritances of England, Scotland, and Wales, its focus more among literary societies in London than among those engaged in “nation-building” activities in Dublin. For others, the Celtic aspect of the Irish Revival was precisely what distinguished it from the modern character of English urban society. Aside from this, the question arises as to how much Celtic Revival in Ireland and Britain grew out of inventions of the Celt as a cultural ideal from the 16th century in Europe. This article opens with a section covering studies of Celtic civilization in Ireland and Britain. Subsequent sections address scholarship on the literary and dramatic aspects of the Irish Revival from the late 19th century, its historical contexts, as well as the range of its political ideas, movements, and activists. Academic publications are also listed on a range of individual literary and language-revival figures associated with the Irish Revival. Later sections cover studies of Pan-Celticism and Celtic Revival in Britain. The final sections identify scholarship on the Irish Revival in the fields of art, design, music, and sport, addressing correspondences between activities in Celtic revival in Ireland and Scotland in the process.

General Works on Celticism

Scholarly work on Celticism stretches from archaeological, historical, and philological accounts of pre- and early-Christian-era Celtic practices, customs, and beliefs to multidisciplinary examinations of Celtic revivals in the British Isles from the 18th century. Brown 1996 is an excellent introduction to the range of scholarly debates surrounding Celticism within Celtic revivals in Ireland and Scotland from the 18th century, particularly in relation to political and cultural debates concerning modern European nationalism. Leading critical discussion of ancient Celtic civilization in Britain and Ireland is provided in Cunliffe 1999, while Chadwick 1997 and Collis 2003 examine myths about the Celts in comparison with contemporary knowledge of Celtic civilization derived from archaeology studies. Maier 2003 and O’Hógáin 2002 draw extensively on classical Roman writings on the Celts in providing instructive and informative accounts of Celtic civilization in Europe during and following the Roman Empire, Maier 2003 tracing lines of continuity and reinvention up to modern times.

Brown, Terence, ed. Celticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.
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An interdisciplinary collection of essays that is of particular value in the attention given to James MacPherson’s Ossian in the context of Celtic discourse in 18th-century Europe. It includes important essays by historians, linguists, and literary critics concerning Celticism in French Enlightenment contexts, Scottish Celticism, and Celticism in relation to both nationalism and colonialism.
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Chadwick, Nora. The Celts. 2d ed. London: Penguin, 1997.
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Drawing upon her extensive knowledge of archaeological and linguistic studies of the origins of Celtic civilization in Ireland, Britain, and Brittany, Chadwick has written a very useful introduction to the religious, artistic, and literary features of Celtic culture in its earliest phase. It is a work also alert to the myths about Celtic peoples that emerges strongly in 18th-century Europe.
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Collis, John. The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2003.
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Coming from the field of archaeology, Collis contrasts the evidence for Celtic civilization in Britain and Ireland against the ideas of the Celts that emerged in the 16th and later centuries. The work offers an important appraisal of myths and historical evidence for Celtic civilization.
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Cunliffe, Barry W. The Ancient Celts. London: Penguin, 1999.
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The most exhaustive account in a single work of pre-Christian Celtic civilization and settlements throughout Europe from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic fringe. Examining patterns of migration, the work is rich in illustrations of major Celtic settlements and artifacts from across Europe. It identifies important distinctions between tribes considered to be the original Celts and those tribes that were later “Celticized.”
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Green, Miranda. Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
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A comprehensive source-reference work, containing entries on all aspects of Celtic religion, mythology, and legend covering the period 500 BCE to 400 CE.
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Hale, Amy, and Philip Payton, eds. New Directions in Celtic Studies. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000.
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An engaging collection of scholarly essays that offers a fresh interdisciplinary approach to the study of Celticism. The volume includes important essays on the commercial representations of Celticism in popular music and film, a comparative study of Celtic culture and tourism in the West of Ireland and in Brittany, and a consideration of the reinvention of Australia as Celtic.
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Koch, John T., ed. Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006.
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This is the largest source-reference work for Celtic Studies, containing 1,500 entries by leading scholars of Celticism from across a range of disciplines covering all aspects of Celtic civilization, historically and geographically.
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Maier, Bernhard. The Celts: A History from Ancient Times to the Present. Translated by Kevin Windle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748616053.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A highly engaging survey of Celtic civilization that draws on archaeological, historical, literary, and linguistic evidence. It is organized effectively into three sections: ancient Celtic civilization on the European continent (Germany, Iberia, Italy, Asia Minor); the period from the end of the Roman Empire to the late Middle Ages; the gradual assimilation of Celtic into the national cultures of Britain, France, and Ireland.
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O’Hógáin, Dáithí. The Celts: A History. Cork, Ireland: Collins, 2002.
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A work of impressive breadth and scholarship concerning the history of Celtic civilization in Europe from 2,500 BCE to the Middle Ages that is particularly useful for its engagement and appraisal of classical Roman sources concerning Celtic civilization, along with comparative linguistic and archaeological studies of modern times.
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New Editions of Primary Texts

Many important publications of Irish Revival writers, including the plays of Lady Gregory and T. W. Rolleston’s Celtic Myths and Legends, have gone out of print. In the 2000s three important new editions of writings from the era of the Irish Revival have been published, namely works by Denis Patrick Moran, Patrick Pearse, and other nationalist playwrights. It is to be hoped that further new editions will be made available in print or in e-book format in future years. Denis Patrick Moran developed the idea of “Irish Ireland” that had a profound influence on cultural nationalism in Ireland, particularly after twenty-six Irish counties formed the independent Irish Free State in 1922. Moran 2006 is an excellent modern edition of Moran’s essays. Dramatist, poet, and political leader of the 1916 Rising, Patrick Pearse is one of the most significant figures of the Irish Revival. His plays have long been out of print. Pearse 2013 is an excellent new edition of Pearse’s plays in English and Irish versions. Many of the leaders of the militant Irish nationalist movement participated in the Irish Revival in composing plays on Irish themes at the start of the 20th century. Most of these plays have been out of print for many years. Moran 2007 is a new edition of four of them.

Moran, Denis Patrick. The Philosophy of Irish Ireland. Edited by Patrick Maume. Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2006.
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This modern edition of the series of essays from the newspaper, The Leader, which journalist Denis Patrick Moran published in 1905 as The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, is hugely important for understanding the nature of cultural debate during the Irish Revival and for considering its subsequent legacy.
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Moran, James, ed. Four Irish Rebel Plays. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2007.
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A very useful selection of plays long out of print that were composed by dramatists in the 1900s, 1910s, and early 1920s, three of whom were executed for leading the 1916 Rising in Ireland.
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Pearse, Patrick. Collected Plays/Drámaí An Phiarsaigh. Edited by Róisín Ní Ghairbhí and Eugene McNulty. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2013.
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Brings together all the plays that Patrick Pearse wrote and produced both in English and in Irish during the 1900s and the 1910s. This is an indispensable edition for considering the aspects of cultural and political nationalism that Pearse developed through drama before leading the Irish rebellion of 1916.
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Archive Sources and Databases

While the works of well-known writers such as Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey are available in published format, many of the original publications of the Celtic Revival in Ireland are long out of print. Therefore, digital archive sources are increasingly important to recovering the literature of the Irish Revival, in addition to the important Scottish and Welsh-English Celtic writings of William Sharp and Ernest Rhys. The most comprehensive digital archive sources are Project Gutenberg and Archive.org. JSTOR and Project MUSE offer extensive access to a wide range of journal publications and a number of book-length studies dealing with Celtic Revival under various themes.

Archive.org.
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Contains a wide range of Lady Gregory’s works. Extensive works by German Celticist Kuno Meyer and French Celticist M. H. Arbois de Jubainville, who were major influences on the revival of the Irish and Welsh languages. Additionally, out-of-print works by Edward Martyn, Eva-Gore Booth, T. W. Rolleston, Standish O’Grady, and other writers of the Irish Revival are available. Ernest Boyd’s 1916 essay collection, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (New York: John Lane), can also be found here.
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JSTOR.
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A wide range of scholarly essays on aspects of Celtic Revival in Ireland are available here, particularly through such leading Irish Studies journals as New Hibernia Review, Irish University Review, and Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. Extremely useful for Pan-Celtic studies, as several essays from The Celtic Review on the topic are available here from the 1909–1911 period.
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Project Gutenberg.
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A rich source for first editions of many works very important to Celtic Revival in Irish, Scottish, and Welsh literature at the start of the 20th century. These include literary writings by Padraic Colum, William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod), George Russell (Æ), James Stephens, T. W. Rolleston, Lady Gregory, Katharine Tynan, and Ernest Rhys. Also available here is Stephen Gwynn’s 1919 work, Irish Books and Irish People (Dublin: Talbot).
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Project Muse.
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Essays relating to Celtic Revival, and to the Irish Revival in particular, are available here through a range of British and American scholarly journals, including English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, Éire-Ireland, Modernism-Modernity, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Journal of Modern Literature. A number of book-length studies are also available through Project Muse.
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The Irish Revival

Undoubtedly the most striking impact of Celtic Revival in modern times is found in the Irish Revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of literary and cultural activity that exerted a profound influence on Irish politics and society through the course of the 20th century. Scholarship on the Irish Revival is extensive, particularly in the field of literary and theater studies, but also including language studies and historical and political studies as well as art and design, music, and sports studies. Deane 1985 points to the significance of a Celtic Revival in Ireland toward the end of the 18th century, but the Irish Revival of the late 19th century achieved much broader influence in social and political terms. Critics deal with the Irish Revival in terms of a number of key concerns. Foremost among these is the question of whether the Irish Revival was both a cultural and a political movement. Hutchinson 1987 presents a sociocultural analysis to argue for the importance of separating the cultural from the political sphere in assessing the Irish Revival. Costello 1977 emphasizes the interconnections between literary activities of those associated with the Irish Revival and the activities of political nationalists in Ireland that led to uprising and Irish independence in the 1910s and 1920s. Watson 1994 is interested in the Irish Revival predominantly as a literary movement. Another concern is the relationship of the Irish Revival to European modernism in the early 20th century. Castle 2001 is the main source for examination of this topic, also addressed in Nolan 2005. Deane 1985 calls for abandoning the myths of heroism and Anglo-Irish aristocracy that were cultivated during the Irish Revival, but Mathews 2003 makes a compelling case for the progressive nature of the Irish Revival as a broad social movement. Mathews contributes to new assessments during the 2000s of contexts for the Irish Revival that have been forgotten or neglected. Similar acts of scholarly recovery are evident in Kelleher 2003 and in Taylor FitzSimon and Murphy 2004.

Castle, Gregory. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511485015Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the most widely acknowledged studies of Irish Revival literature in recent times. Addresses a range of critical interpretations in the field of Irish Revival Studies to highlight the ways in which the work of leading writings of the Irish Revival created a body of literary modernism in the anthropological feature of their literary works.
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Costello, Peter. The Heart Grown Brutal: The Irish Revolution in Literature from Parnell to the Death of Yeats, 1891–1939. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1977.
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This remains one of the most impressive studies of Irish literature from the Irish Revival period, identifying the intersections and the influences on Irish Revival literature of the monumental political changes in Ireland from the period of Parnell to the death of W. B. Yeats in 1939.
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Deane, Seamus. Celtic Revivals. London: Faber, 1985.
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The first eight chapters of this book of fourteen chapters represent some of the most important readings since the 1980s of the major writers from the Irish Revival. In particular, Deane’s chapter on Matthew Arnold, Edmund Burke, and the Celts is vital to later studies of Celticism in its Irish context, while his chapter on Yeats and the Irish Revival has been one of the most influential pieces of critical writing since this work was published.
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Hutchinson, James. The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State. London: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
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A compelling sociohistorical approach to the Irish Revival period, Hutchinson’s study is of great importance in identifying the specific processes that distinguish cultural from political nationalism. Alert to theorists of nationalism such as Ernest Gellner, Hutchinson offers a critical appraisal of the Irish Revival through a lucid theoretical framework, even if the distinctions that he draws between the fields of the cultural and the political are sometimes overly insistent.
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Kelleher, Margaret, ed. Special Issue: New Perspectives on the Irish Literary Revival. Irish University Review 33.1 (Spring/Summer 2003).
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Gathering together a range of essays by Irish literature scholars, this is an important contribution to the publication of scholarly reevaluations of the Irish Revival movement in the field of Irish Studies during the early 2000s.
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Mathews, P. J. Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2003.
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Arguing for the Irish Revival as a progressive social movement rather than a mystical and romantic turn to the past, Mathew’s study is most valuable for the contacts and interactions between different groups within the Irish Revival. He identifies cooperation as a key idea with the Irish Revival as a broad cultural and social movement. Published in association with Field Day.
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Nolan, Emer. “Modernism and the Irish Revival.” In Modern Irish Culture. Edited by Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, 157–172. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL052182009XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Developing from her work on Joyce and the Irish Revival, Nolan identifies some of the complex features of the Irish Revival in relation to the advent of international modernism in the early 20th century.
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Taylor FitzSimon, Betsey, and James H. Murphy, eds. The Irish Revival Reappraised. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2004.
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The most important collection of essays to reevaluate the Irish Revival in the context of its times. The collection is distinguished by Selina Guinness’s excellent reading of the Dublin Theosophy movement as a vehicle by which Irish Protestant intellectuals moved in the direction of the cultural nationalism of the Revival period. It also includes important readings of the Irish Co-operative Movement by Leanne Lane and of shifting tensions in the Irish language organization, the Gaelic League, by Liam MacMathúna.
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Watson, George G. J. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey. 2d ed. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994.
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Concentrating on four of the best-known writers that emerged during the period of the Irish Revival, this is one of the most important readings of the vexed question of Irish identity as it emerges in Irish Revival. Watson sets this effectively in relation to the political context of the Irish Revival, particularly with regard to Irish nationalism.
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Special Studies

The Celtic Revival at the end of the 19th century in Ireland has sometimes been misrepresented as a relatively homogeneous movement, broadly traditional in the social values espoused through its literature, and romantic in its evocation of Celtic mythology, spirituality, and language. Special studies of the Irish Revival reveal the complexities of the times and of the movement. These include discussions of Irish Revival literature that attend to prose fiction of the period, to the Anglo-Irish dimension, and to the influence of British imperial ideology, even in Irish nationalist writing. Studies of the revival of the Irish language address progressivist and traditionalist tendencies within the movement, and the demographic variety of the Gaelic League. Social studies address the influence of Catholic clergy in the Irish Revival and the complex social issues around folk beliefs in rural Ireland at the time. Comparative studies explore the web of influences and interactions between ideas on ethnic and national culture in Ireland and those of other nations during the Revival, including Germany.

Literature

Foster 1987 is an important study of prose literature in the Irish Revival, given how critical interest has concentrated mainly on poetry and drama. In the process, the author draws attention to some neglected works and authors. Higgins 2012 traces the heroic theme in Celtic mythological writings of the Irish Revival back to Thomas Carlyle, an important exponent of British national and imperial values in the 19th century. Longley 2003 looks to the mid-20th century Irish intellectual Hubert Butler in emphasizing the Anglo-Irish dimension of the Irish Revival. Mahaffy examines the particular character of desire in Irish writing that emerged in the Irish Revival through such figures as Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. Nolan 1995 is the foremost account of James Joyce’s complex relationship to the Irish Revival.

Foster, John Wilson. Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987.
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An impressively comprehensive study of writing during the Irish Revival. Not only addresses the work of well-established figures such as Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde, but also devotes space to writings by neglected writers who were greatly significant to the Irish Revival as a literary movement in its time. These include Eleanor Hull, William Larminie, Padraic Colum, and Gerald O’Donovan.
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Higgins, Geraldine. Heroic Revivals: From Carlyle to Yeats. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137280954Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A vital examination of the concept of heroism and the hero in the work of Synge, George Russell (Æ), and Yeats during the Irish Revival, Higgins’s work is attentive to the discourse of heroism in the writings of Thomas Carlyle as hugely significant to the work of these preeminent Irish writers of the Irish Revival period.
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Longley, Edna. “Butler and the Irish Literary Revival.” In Unfinished Ireland: Essays on Hubert Butler. Edited by Chris Agee, 102–107. Belfast, Ireland: Irish Pages, 2003.
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Assesses the perspective of Hubert Butler, one of Ireland’s most prominent intellectual figures in the mid-20th century, on the Irish Revival in the light of the cultural stagnation that followed Irish political independence and the partitioning of the island in 1921. Published in association with the Butler Society.
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Mahaffy, Vicky. States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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A compelling study of the relationship between language and desire in the work of these three world-renowned authors who emerge from Ireland during the period of the Irish Revival. Covers an impressive array of texts in describing what she names as the aspects of Irish desire in the work of these authors.
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Nolan, Emer. “Joyce and the Irish Literary Revival.” In James Joyce and Nationalism. By Emer Nolan, 23–54. London: Routledge, 1995.
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A theoretically informed and a historically astute reading of James Joyce’s attitudes to the Irish Revival as a literary movement. Discuss Joyce’s differences with Yeats, his attitudes to cultural nationalism, and the complex representation of Irish history in Joyce’s short-story, “The Dead.”
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Irish Language and Irish-Language Literature Studies

McMahon 2008 is a thorough account of the movement to review the Irish language within the broader Celtic Revival of the late 19th century. O’Leary 1994 deals most impressively with Irish-language literature during the Irish Revival, a study that is particularly important in identifying the tensions between traditionalists and modernizers within the movement to revive the Irish language.

McMahon, Timothy G. Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008.
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The best account to date of the Gaelic League as a social movement in the Irish Revival. Drawing on a wide range of sources—both in English and in Irish—McMahon profiles the membership of the Gaelic League during its most successful period in the Irish Revival.
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O’Leary, Philip. The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
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A monumental study of Irish-language literature during the Irish Revival, it offers richly detailed chapters on folklore, narratives of history, and translation in the prose literature of the Irish Revival. It concludes with a very significant chapter on the position of Irish-language literature from the 1916 Rising to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921.
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Social Studies and Comparative Studies

Bourke 1999 is a fascinating and disturbing case study of folk beliefs in rural Ireland that were championed during the Irish Revival, one that explores their complex relation to state and church authority. Collins 2002 is a crucial study of the Catholic Church and Celtic Revival in Ireland, while Fischer 2000 is the main German-language study of the Irish Revival, examining the representations of and attitudes to German culture, history, and politics in Irish literature and journalism from the 1890s through the First World War and beyond to the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s. Garrigan Mattar 2004 develops a compelling analysis of the influence that the discipline of comparative ethnology in England, France, and Germany had on the Celtic literature of the Irish Revival.

Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story. London: Pimlico, 1999.
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A unique cultural historical examination of the true life case of a woman who disappeared in rural Ireland in 1895. Her father and brother claimed that she had been abducted by fairies, and her burnt body was eventually recovered by the police. Bourke provides an intriguing critique of fairy belief in Ireland just as writers of the Irish Revival were publishing prose and poetry on traditional beliefs in fairies among some rural communities in Ireland.
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Collins, Kevin. Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2002.
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The most important study of the role of the Catholic Church in the Irish Revival. Particularly valuable in identifying the relationship between cultural nationalism and Catholic religious practice and for its discussion of the role of the national seminary, Maynooth College, in the revival of the Irish language.
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Fischer, Joachim. Das Deutschlandbild der Iren, 1890–1939: Geschichte, Form, Funktion. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2000.
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The most comprehensive German-language study of the Irish image of Germany during the period of the Irish Revival, with particular attention to German support for the Easter Rising of 1916 and of the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Draws on a wide range of sources, including literature, travelogues, newspapers, film, and school textbooks.
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Garrigan Mattar, Sinéad. Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004.
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Starting from what is described as the rise of “Celtology,” Garrigan Mattar presents a groundbreaking analysis of late-19th-century comparative ethnology as a vital dimension to representations of native Irish customs and folklore in the plays and prose of Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory during the Irish Revival.
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General Works on Irish Literature that Include the Irish Revival

The range of studies that touch upon the Irish Revival in some form or another is vast, given Yeats’s centrality to the movement and the fact that it was sustained over a period of three decades, during which Ireland emerged as an independent nation-state, with Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. Within studies that stretch widely beyond the Irish Revival, a predominant theme concerns the Irish Revival itself as a literary movement of decolonization. This idea is developed in Marxist terms in Cairns and Richards 1988 and in Eagleton 1995, and in more anti-colonial nationalist terms in Kiberd 1995. Campbell 2013 identifies the poetic contrasts and connections between Victorian Irish and English poetry as important lines of influences for Yeats’s major contribution to English-language poetry within the Irish Revival, recovering the importance of the union between Ireland and Britain as the context for his poetic evolution. Campbell expands on an earlier work—Moynahan 1995—in which Yeats’s writing is set in the context of Anglo-Irish literary traditions. Lennon 2004 presents an impressive reading of literature from the Irish Revival as concurrent with the ideological form of Orientalism, a notion pivotal to postcolonial studies since the work of Edward Said. Lennon is also alert to how Celticism in Irish Revival writing moves counter to this form, though from within. Kelleher and O’Leary 2006 includes a range of survey essays of immense value to critical understanding of the Irish Revival. O’Connell 2006 turns to the largely neglected genre of “improvement” fiction in evaluating the aspirations of many Irish Revivalists. Taylor 1969 remains an excellent resource for consideration of interpersonal relations among writers within the Irish Revival, examining the role of “coterie” in the literary aspects of the Revival.

Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988.
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One of the most important and influential readings of Irish writing from the 19th century that is informed by theories of language and the politics of cultural identity. Offers important readings of Standish O’Grady, Yeats, and Synge in terms of colonial/postcolonial cultural representations.
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Campbell, Matthew. Irish Poetry under the Union, 1801–1924. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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A detailed examination of the influences and interactions between English and Irish poetry mainly in the English language through the 19th century and into the Irish Revival, primarily in the poetry of Yeats. Most insightful in appraising poetic relations and differences between the 19th-century poetry of Mangan, Ferguson, Tennyson, and Swinburne. Evaluates Yeats’s poetry of the Irish Revival on this basis.
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Eagleton, Terry. “The Archaic Avant-Garde.” In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. By Terry Eagleton, 273–319. London: Verso, 1995.
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Eagleton’s chapter on the Irish Revival as a form of what he describes as “the archaic avant-garde” is of major significance to critical interpretations of the Irish Revival, positioning it between nostalgic romanticism and a radical modernist aesthetics. The chapter on culture and politics from Davis to Joyce is also of significance to Irish Revival studies.
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Eagleton, Terry. “The Ryan Line.” In Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture. By Terry Eagleton, 249–272. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1998.
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This chapter examines the writing of Frank Ryan, a socialist intellectual in the Irish Revival during the 1900s, whose writings have been neglected. Published in association with Field Day.
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Kelleher, Margaret, and Philip O’Leary, eds. The Cambridge History of Irish Literature. Vol. 2, 1890–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 50–269.
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An essential source for study of the Irish Revival, presenting four chapters on the movement, three that are each dedicated to separate literary genres—poetry, prose, and drama—and one that treats the Irish-language literature of the Irish Revival.
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Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Irish Nation. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.
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Probably the most widely cited critical study of modern Irish literature since its first publication in the mid-1990s. Includes highly influential readings of Wilde, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, Hyde, and Joyce in postcolonial terms that are significant to critical study of the Irish Revival.
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Lennon, Joseph. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.
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A groundbreaking study that draws upon and revises the terms of Edward Said’s hugely influential work on Orientalism, directing this toward the idea of the Celt in Irish writing and its affinities with that of the Oriental. The four chapters of Part 2, “The Oriental and the Celt,” are essential reading for understanding the national and imperial contexts of the Irish Revival.
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Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
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A consideration of Protestant Anglo-Irish literature since the Act of Union, this study is important in setting Yeats’s involvement in the Irish Revival specifically in the context of Anglo-Irish literary traditions.
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O’Connell, Helen. “The Aesthetics of Excess: Improvement and Revivalism.” In Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement. By Helen O’Connell, 165–199. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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An original study of literature that was directed toward social improvement in 19th-century Ireland. The final chapter is of particular relevance to the Irish Revival in the attention that it directs toward Revivalism and its relation to ideas of social improvement.
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Taylor, Estella Ruth. The Modern Irish Writers: Cross-Currents of Criticism. 2d ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969.
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First published in the 1950s, this work remains a valuable reference source for the extensive range of writers associated with the Irish Revival, including many lesser-known figures such as Stephen Gwynn, Edward Martyn, Katharine Tynan, and John Ervine. Taylor’s idea of the literary coterie in the Irish Revival has still not received the critical and theoretical evaluation that it should be accorded.
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Historical Contexts

Several important Irish historical studies address the Irish Revival era. While the focus is understandably on political events, Ferriter 2004, Foster 1988 Lyons 1973, and Lyons 1979 also attend to the impact of the Irish Revival in the development of ideas about Irish national identity, mythology, and history. Maume 1999 is the best historical account of the course of Irish nationalism during the twenty-five years in which the Irish Revival was at its peak, from the death of Parnell in 1891 to the Easter Rising of 1916. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Garvin 2005 are of particular value in addressing the influence and the involvement of the Catholic clergy in cultural and political nationalist activities during the Irish Revival. Innes 1993 explores the history of women’s involvement in the Irish Revival and the political movements to which they were aligned, in particular Anna Parnell’s Ladies Land League. Foster 2014 brings to life the variety of attitudes and ideals that motivated many who partook in the cultural and political activities of the Irish Revival era.

Ferriter, Diarmuid. The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000. London: Polity, 2004.
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The first two chapters of this far-ranging survey provide an excellent account of the historical and political contexts for the development of the Irish Revival in the first two decades of the 20th century.
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Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland, 1600–1972. London: Allen Lane, 1988.
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Foster’s major historical study—epitomizing the revisionist approach to the study of Irish history—includes a short but significant account of the Irish Revival in the context of what Foster describes as the “new nationalism” emerging in Ireland toward the end of the 19th century.
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Foster, R. F. Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923. London: Norton, 2014.
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Drawing upon a rich source of archive materials, Foster writes an absorbingly detailed and far-ranging account of the diverse range of attitudes, activities, and emotions of figures involved in cultural and political revival in Ireland in the years leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916.
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Garvin, Tom. Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858–1928: Patriots, Priests and the Roots of the Irish Revolution. 2d ed. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 2005.
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An accomplished discussion of nationalist revolutionary politics as it evolved in Ireland from the 1860s to the foundation of the Irish Free State, the study is of particular value in the light that it sheds upon the support of Catholic clergy in Ireland for cultural and political nationalist endeavors, especially during the period of the Irish Revival in the 1890s and 1900s.
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Innes, C. L. Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
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Adopting a feminist postcolonial perspective, Innes provides an essential consideration of women’s involvement in the literary and political movements within the Irish Revival, examining ideas of Irish womanhood in the plays of Lady Gregory as well as the political practices of Anna Parnell, Maud Gonne, and Contance Markiewicz.
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Lyons, F. S. L. Ireland since the Famine. 2d ed. London: Fontana, 1973.
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Part 2 of Lyons’s major historical survey is vital as an account of the historical circumstances and the political ideas that map the context for the Irish Revival, in particular for the influence of D. P. Moran’s notion of the “battle of two civilizations”—Gaelic and Anglo-Irish—for claims over Irish identity during the Irish Revival period.
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Lyons, F. S. L. Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.
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A series of essays in which the political developments and upheavals during and following the Irish Revival are considered in terms of four competing cultural formations, conceived in anthropological terms: Gaelic, English, Anglo-Irish, and Northern Irish Protestant. While Lyons’s assumptions regarding the autonomy of these formations is now open to question, his essays remain important as those of a seminal Irish historian on the literary and cultural activities of the Irish Revival.
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Maume, Patrick. The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891–1918. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1999.
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One of the most detailed accounts of the interactions between the constitutional nationalism of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the more militant separatist nationalism of Sinn Féin and other groups during the Irish Revival in the 1890s and 1900s.
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Political Activists, Movements, and Ideas

Many nationalist, socialist, and feminist political activists became involved in the Irish Revival. As a consequence, the politics of the Irish Revival was varied, often generating internal debates and disagreements. Augustin 2010 is the most comprehensive study of the development of Patrick Pearse, the iconic leader of the 1916 Rising who became involved in the Irish Revival through his plays, poetry, and educational practices. Sisson 2004 examines Pearse’s educational ideas and practices in the school that he founded in Dublin, St. Enda’s. Dwan 2008 explores the political thought of the Young Ireland movement in the mid-19th century. This book is important in identifying contexts and trajectories for the political ideas of Yeats, illuminating Yeats’s public dispute with Charles Gavan Duffy during the Irish Revival, with Duffy a link back to the generation of Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland movement. Hay 2009 examines the involvement of the nationalist Bulmer Hobson in the Irish language revival and in the Gaelic Athletic Association. Lawlor 2009 is a detailed discussion of the nationalist youth organization that emerged in the Irish Revival, Na Fianna Éireann, while McGee 2007 explores the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) during the first phase of the Irish Revival from the 1880s to the early 1900s. Lynch 2005 examines socialist thought and practice during the Irish Revival through the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Pašeta 2013, Steele 2007, and Ward 1995 consider various aspects of women’s political activism during the Irish Revival, including theatre writing and performance, journalism, and nationalist women’s political organizations. The Irish Co-operative Movement was one of the most successful economic endeavors of the Irish Revival. For studies of the movement and its founder, Horace Plunkett, as well as its most well-known spokesperson, George Russell (Æ), consult the entries under these subsections.

Augustin, Joost. Patrick Pearse: The Making of a Revolutionary. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230290693Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An excellent detailed study of the life and thought of the leader of the Easter Rising of 1916. It is particularly relevant to studies of the Irish Revival in its chapters on Pearse as a cultural nationalist and as a revolutionary.
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Dwan, David. The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland. Dublin, Ireland: Field Day, 2008.
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Offers an intriguing reconsideration of the ideas of Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland movement in relation to classical and to French Enlightenment notions of community and republic. Of particular value in understanding Charles Gavan Duffy’s disputes with Yeats in the period of the Irish Revival. Published in association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame.
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Hay, Marnie. Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in the Twentieth-Century Ireland. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009.
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Addresses one of the most neglected and significant figures of Irish separatist nationalism in the Irish Revival period. Examines Hobson’s Ulster Quaker roots, his involvement in the movement to revive the Irish language, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and the political party Sinn Féin.
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Lawlor, Damian. Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909 to 1923. Rhode, Ireland: Caoillte, 2009.
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Examines the nationalist political youth organization that was founded in 1909 with a committee that included important Irish Republican figures during the Irish Revival such as Bulmer Hobson and Countess Markiewicz. Traces its growth to an organization of 30,000 members, and its involvement in the Irish Volunteers and in the 1916 Rising.
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Lynch, David. Radical Politics in Modern Ireland: The Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896–1904. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 2005.
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An in-depth study of the most radical left-wing political organization of the Irish Revival at the end of the 19th century, led by James Connolly. Provides extensive discussion of its role in the 1898 commemorations of the 1798 United Irishman rebellion and its activism in support of the Boers during the Boer War.
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McGee, Owen. The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Féin. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2007.
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Examines the history of this organization from the Land League agitation of the early 1880s to the beginning of the First World War, the period in which the Irish Revival reached its peak. The IRB was of greatest significance to the Irish Revival through John O’Leary, who initiated W. B. Yeats into the Irish Republican Brotherhood for a period.
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Pašeta, Senia. Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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Developing from the earlier work of Margaret Ward, Pašeta draws attention to women’s cultural organizations, particularly in the field of theatre, that impacted strongly on the Irish Revival. Insightful discussion of the relations between feminism and republicanism in Dublin during the Irish Revival period. Makes an interesting argument for the distinction between an old and a new nationalism in the Irish Revival.
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Sisson, Elaine. Pearse’s Patriots: St Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2004.
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The best study of the cultural influences on Pearse’s ideas of masculinity and boyhood in his drama, poetry, and prose works for Irish cultural revival. Draws attention to the influence of Standish O’Grady’s work on Pearse, and to the significance of the widespread interest in Wagner’s operas at the end of the 19th century for Pearse’s cultural ideas and his contributions to the Irish Revival.
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Steele, Karen. Women, Press, and Politics during the Irish Revival. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007.
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Focuses extensively on women’s journalism during the Irish Revival period, looking at a wide range of newspaper articles from many cultural and/or political women nationalists in Ireland during the Irish Revival. Among those writers considered are Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Delia Larkin, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, and Louie Bennett.
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Ward, Margaret. Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism. London: Pluto, 1995.
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An absorbing account of three women’s associations—the Ladies Land League, Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Eireann), and Cumann na mBan (The Women’s Association)—that played a significant role in both the cultural activities of the Irish Revival as well as the political nationalism of the Irish Revival period. The book is of particular value for the accounts given of the activities of Anna Parnell, Maud Gonne, and Constance Markiewicz during the period.
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Drama of the Irish Revival

Apart from the poetry of Yeats and the revival of the Irish language, the most enduring cultural legacy of the Irish Revival was the birth of the Irish Literary Theatre, which acquired a permanent home at the Abbey Theatre in 1904. The Irish Literary Theatre was dedicated to producing plays dealing with Irish life, history, and mythology. Renamed the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903, its repertoire included plays drawing upon Celtic mythology and folklore associated with Ireland, particularly those of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and George Russell (Æ). Up to the 1980s, critical studies of the drama of the Irish Revival during the 1900s were mostly concerned with plays themselves as literary texts, particularly those by Synge and Yeats. Emerging in the Abbey Theatre during the 1920s, the plays of Sean O’Casey have tended to be regarded separately from the earlier phase of the Irish Revival, though his work was greatly indebted to that earlier movement. From the 1990s more attention has been devoted to the Abbey Theatre as a cultural institution that involved competing personalities and competing attitudes concerning the course that the Abbey Theatre should take in its treatment of Celtic themes.

The Irish Dramatic Movement and the Early Works of the Abbey Theatre

Frazier 1990 and Levitas 2002 are the two major studies of the cultural and political contests within the Irish Dramatic Movement in the years leading up to and immediately following the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. Harris 2002 provides the best critical study of the gender ideology of the early Abbey Theatre. McEnulty 2008 is vital as the only book-length study of the Irish Dramatic Movement in Ulster and Reynolds contextualizes the plays of the Irish Revival in terms of wider social practices concerning public spectacle, through which the author situates the Irish Revival in terms of early-20th-century modernism. Roche 2015 is an excellent survey of the major works and figures of the Irish Dramatic Movement from its inception. Vandervelde 2005 considers a range of theater groups and dramatists who were active in Ireland outside the Abbey Theatre in the 1907–1913 period of the Irish Revival. Watt 1991 is a detailed study of popular 19th-century Dublin melodrama as a significant influence on the work of James Joyce and Sean O’Casey.

Frazier, Adrian. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
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The seminal study of the early Abbey Theatre and the internal contests over control and meaning of the Irish Dramatic Movement between the Abbey Theatre’s first patron, the directors of the Irish Literary Theatre, and the contributing playwrights, at the start of the 20th century.
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Frazier, Adrian. “The Ideology of the Abbey Theatre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Edited by Shaun Richards, 33–46. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521804000Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Developed from his earlier book on the Abbey Theatre, Frazier provides here a succinct summary of the ideological forms at play within the contests over control of the new Irish theatre movement during the Irish Revival.
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Harris, Susan. Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
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A study of the politics of the body in drama of the Irish Revival, Harris devotes chapters to the plays of Yeats, Synge, Pearse, and O’Casey. Apart from the feminist issues arising from the ubiquitous representations of women by male dramatists in the Irish Revival, Harris’s work is critical in identifying discourses of sexual biology and, in particular, the rise of eugenics as crucial to understanding the Irish Revival, national drama, and the debates surrounding the movement for a national theatre.
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Levitas, Ben. The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism, 1890–1916. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253432.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Levitas expands on Frazier’s work in the 1890s on the early Irish Dramatic Movement to extend the range of dramatists brought into consideration and the various ideological contests over the artistic and political pressures around plays that addressed concerns received by audiences as national. Most impressive for bringing into dialogue works by James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Padraic Colum, George Birmingham, and several other figures.
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McEnulty, Eugene. The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2008.
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The major study of the Belfast-based theatre group that was a significant rival to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for a period and that developed Celtic Revival in Ulster in ways distinctive from cultural nationalist activities in Dublin. Of particular significance for its examination of the dramas of Gerald MacNamara.
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Reynolds, Paige. Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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A detailed examination of modernism and the Irish Revival in terms of public spectacle. Repositions the Irish Revival in relation to social and political activism in Dublin from the 1900s. Looks at the role of the Catholic Church, the Gaelic League, and the Gaelic Athletic Association in recontextualizing the dramas of Hyde, Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and George Moore.
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Roche, Anthony. The Irish Dramatic Revival, 1899–1939. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
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An invaluable survey of the Irish Dramatic Movement of the Irish Revival. Very impressive range, balancing attention to well-established figures—Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, O’Casey—with discussion of Douglas Hyde, Denis Johnson, and Teresa Deevy. Includes an excellent section on Shaw and the Irish Revival, and also focuses on the impact of Ibsen’s work.
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Vandervelde, Karen. The Alternative Dramatic Revival in Ireland, 1897–1913. Dublin, Ireland: Maunsel, 2005.
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Addresses a wide range of theatre practices during the Irish Revival that were separate from the Irish Literary Theatre and undertaken away from the Abbey Theatre. Devotes detailed attention to the many amateur and semi-professional companies in existence during the 1900s. Discusses six plays from the period that have been forgotten, including works by Padraic Colum, Patrick Pearse, and Johanna Redmond.
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Watt, Stephen. Joyce, O’Casey and the Irish Popular Theatre. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
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A significant reading of popular theatrical and melodrama influences on Joyce and O’Casey that is one of the first studies to identify a Dublin popular theatre scene to which the Irish Literary Theatre was in some measure a reaction. Watt’s discussion of Dion Boucicault’s influence is particularly impressive in this respect.
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Works on Modern Irish Drama that Include the Irish Revival

The range of references to the plays of the Irish Dramatic Movement during the Irish Revival is extensive in Irish drama criticism, particularly to those of Synge and O’Casey. Welch 1999 and Pilkington 2001 focus on the Abbey Theatre as a cultural institution that carries political significance for Irish society, regarding the revival of Celtic themes on stage at the beginning of the 20th century in these terms. Murray 1997 is more focused on the plays themselves, devoting separate chapters to individual playwrights. Though not concerned specifically with Celtic themes in drama, McDonald 2002 is important in evaluating the tragic mode through which many of the Celtic mythological themes were represented in drama during the early phase of the Irish Revival. Grene 1999 includes important readings of Cathleen ni Houlihan and of Shaw’s relations with the Abbey Theatre. Morash and Richards 2013 sets out theoretical concepts of social and theatrical space for reading plays by Synge and Yeats during the Irish Revival.

Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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Within this broad survey of Irish drama from the 19th century to the end of the 20th, Grene presents a fascinating reading of “the stranger in the house” motif in the first phase of the Irish Dramatic Movement, considering famous plays by Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge in this respect. Also contains an important reading of O’Casey but is, perhaps, of most lasting value for the light that it sheds on Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island in relation to the drama of the Irish Revival.
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McDonald, Ronan. Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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Important in its own right as a rare examination of the idea of tragedy in modern Irish drama, this book offers valuable insight into the tragic motif as a definitive feature of the Irish Revival drama of Synge and O’Casey.
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Morash, Chris, and Shaun Richards. Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139600309Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An innovative study of 20th-century Irish drama in terms of spatial theory. Devotes considerable attention to the Irish Revival plays of Synge and of Yeats in the 1900s with regard to ideas of individual and national identity inscribed in the organization of stage space.
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Murray, Christopher. Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: A Mirror Up to Nation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997.
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The first four chapters are important readings of the plays that came to define the Irish Revival on stage in the first three decades of the 20th century, with separate chapters devoted to the drama of Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, and O’Casey.
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Pilkington, Lionel. Theatre and State in 20th Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. New York: Routledge, 2001.
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An original consideration of the Irish Literary Theatre and the directorship of the early Abbey Theatre as liberal unionist in political orientation. The first three chapters focus on the Irish Dramatic Movement in relation to Home Rule, the influence of liberal political unionism at the Abbey Theatre, and the significance to the Abbey Theatre of the emergence of Sinn Féin in the first decade of the 20th century.
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Welch, Robert. The Abbey Theatre, 1899–1999: Form and Pressure. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121879.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this historical account of the Abbey Theatre over the course of the 20th century, the first two chapters offer important discussion of the genesis of the Irish theatre movement as part of the Irish Revival.
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Individual Authors

Critical studies of the work of individual authors of the Irish Revival are still disproportionately concerned with W. B. Yeats. A section of Yeats scholarship is included here on the basis that it treats Yeats’s involvement in Celtic Revival in Ireland. Following Yeats, studies of individual authors of the Irish Revival have focused primarily on Synge and, to a lesser extent, on Lady Gregory and Sean O’Casey. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw an upsurge in publications of detailed biographies of literary figures from the Irish Revival. These include biographical studies of Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Lady Gregory, and George Moore. Critical assessments have also appeared since the early 2000s of writers and activists of the Irish Revival era whose work has received passing attention or has been largely neglected. These include new studies of Standish O’Grady, George Russell (Æ), Eva-Gore Booth, Stephen Gwynn, and Alice Milligan. Extensive critical discussion of many of the authors listed here can also be found in several of the works cited in different sections of this article. For example, McMahon 2008, O’Leary 1994 (both cited under Irish Language and Irish-Language Literature Studies) and Moore 2012 (cited under Sport) focus extensively on Douglas Hyde, founder of the movement to revive the Irish language, the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge). Lennon 2004 (cited under General Works on Irish Literature That Include the Irish Revival) includes important discussion of James Stephens, a figure who has been neglected in recent decades. Published research on several other important figures of the Irish Revival, including Alfred Percival Graves, T. W. Rolleston, and St. John Ervine, remains scant.

Padraic Colum

Poet, dramatist, and writer of stories, Padraic Colum was one of the most popular writers of the Irish Revival during the 1900s. He wrote a number of important plays for the Abbey Theatre in its early years. In later life he published versions of Irish, Hawaiian, and Greek folklore and mythology for children. Sternlicht 1985 is the only book-length study of Colum to date.

Sternlicht, Sanford. Padraic Colum. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
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A useful introduction to this prolific writer of mythological plays and stories from the period of the Irish Revival.
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Eva Gore-Booth

Poet, dramatist, feminist, and socialist political activist during the Irish Revival, Gore-Booth was the younger sister of Countess Markiewicz, one of the most widely known nationalist figures of the Irish Revival era. Tiernan 2012 is the first book-length study of this greatly neglected figure of the Irish Revival.

Tiernan, Sonja. Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012.
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This is the first biography of one of the most intriguing and radical figures of the Irish Revival, Eva Gore-Booth, a feminist and a nationalist who moved between various groups during the period of the Irish Revival.
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Lady Gregory

Co-founder of the Irish Literary Theatre and director of the Abbey Theatre for many years, Gregory’s extensive body of plays and folklore/mythology writing remain underresearched. Hill 2005 and Kohfeldt 1985 are excellent biographical studies. Pethica 2004 is a good introduction to her plays. Remport 2011 sheds new light on Gregory and the visual arts. Knapp 1995 observes the ideological conflicts of Gregory’s plays. Fogarty 2004 provides an important range of new perspectives on Gregory’s drama, folklore work, and political outlook.

Fogarty, Anne, ed Special Issue: Lady Gregory. Irish University Review 34.1 (Spring–Summer 2004).
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The most important collection of essays dedicated to the work of Lady Gregory since the 1980s. Of particular significance to a reconsideration of Gregory in relation to the Irish Revival is Sinéad Garrigan Mattar’s discussion of the impact of Egyptian nationalism on Gregory in shaping her attitudes to England’s Irish policies from the 1900s. These are identified for the first time in studies of Lady Gregory as a form of “colonial nationalism” (a concept arising first in George D. Boyce’s study of Irish nationalism).
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Hill, Judith. Lady Gregory: An Irish Life. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2005.
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In this finest biographical study of Lady Gregory, Hill succeeds in bringing out the tensions between Gregory’s identifications with Irish nationalist and Anglo-Irish gentry culture through the course of her life and work for cultural revival in Ireland.
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Knapp, James F. “Irish Primitivism and Imperial Discourse: Lady Gregory’s Peasantry.” In Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism. Edited by Jonathan Arac and Harriett Ritvo, 286–301. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
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Discusses the ways in which Gregory’s representations of Irish peasant characters and situations in her plays amount to a form of romantic primitivism. Knapp sees this as evidence of Gregory expressing conflicted perspectives that are shaped both by imperial and by anti-colonial attitudes.
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Kohfeldt, Mary Lou. Lady Gregory: The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance. New York: Atheneum, 1985.
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A richly detailed and indispensable source for the study of Lady Gregory and her role in the Irish Revival.
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Pethica, James. “Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre Drama: Ireland Real and Ideal.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Edited by Shaun Richards, 62–78. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521804000Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A compelling survey of the range of Gregory’s plays for the Abbey Theatre that succeed in demonstrating their centrality to the Irish Revival movement.
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Remport, Eglantina. “‘I usually first see a play as a picture’: Lady Gregory and the Visual Arts.” Irish University Review 41.2 (Autumn–Winter 2011): 42–58.
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Examines Lady Gregory’s extensive familiarity with European art as well as her place in London literary and artistic circles as crucial influences on the composition of her plays for the Irish Revival.
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Stephen Gwynn

Gwynn was an important figure in the Irish Revival, from the mid-1890s when he became secretary of the Irish Literary Society in London. Later he became an Irish Home Rule Party politician and was involved with the movement to revive the Irish language, the Gaelic League. Reid 2011 is an excellent study of Gwynn’s life, work, and thought.

Reid, Colin. The Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011.
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Explores the relation between the moderate constitutional nationalism of the Irish Home Rule Party and the literary activities of the Irish Revival through the figure of Stephen Gwynn. Gwynn was a member of John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party, a literary activist in the Irish Revival, and a literary adviser to the London publishing house of Macmillan, the publisher of Yeats’s major works in his lifetime.
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Douglas Hyde

The founder of the Irish-language organization the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) in 1893, Douglas Hyde is a pivotal figure in the Irish Revival. In addition to his work on behalf of the Irish language, Hyde also wrote plays in Irish and English for the Abbey Theatre and published translations of Irish ballad poetry. Daly 1974 is an engaging account of the development of Hyde’s interest in the Irish language. Ó’Lúing 1972 summarizes Hyde’s work for the Gaelic League. Dunleavy and Dunleavy 1991 is the most important book-length study of Hyde to date. O’Leary 2009 gives a very interesting comparative reading of Hyde and the Welsh-language activist Saunders Lewis.

Daly, Dominic. The Young Douglas Hyde: the Dawn of the Irish Revolution and Renaissance, 1874–1893. Dublin, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1974.
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A detailed examination of the ideas and circumstances of Hyde’s upbringing and education that led him to found the Gaelic League, the Irish-language revival organization, in 1893. Includes a foreword by former president of the Republic of Ireland Erskine Childers.
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Dunleavy, Janet Egleson, and Gareth W. Dunleavy. Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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The major biography of the founder of the modern movement to revive the Irish language, this is a hugely important study, not only for demonstrating Hyde’s importance to figures such as Yeats in the 1900s, but also for delivering great insight into the complexity of Hyde’s personality and the aspects of his commitment to Irish nationalism that were sometimes in conflict.
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O’Leary, Paul. “Public Intellectuals, Language Revival, and Cultural Nationalism in Ireland and Wales: A Comparison of Douglas Hyde and Saunders Lewis.” Irish Studies Review 17.1 (2009): 5–18.
DOI: 10.1080/09670880802658109Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An engaging comparative consideration of nationalism and language revival in Ireland and Wales through an examination of Hyde’s work to advance the Irish language in Ireland and Lewis’s work on behalf of the Welsh language in Wales.
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Ó’Lúing, Seán. “Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 62.246 (Summer 1972): 123–138.
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A valuable account of Hyde’s activities for the Gaelic League set in relation to consideration of his Anglo-Irish ancestral roots.
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Kuno Meyer

A German philologist specializing in Celtic languages, Meyer was a great influence on Hyde and on the movement to revive the Irish language and also contributed to the Welsh language movement. Meyer co-founded the major journal Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie in 1896, and he founded the School of Irish Learning in Dublin in 1903, becoming the Todd Professor of Celtic Languages at the Royal Irish Academy in 1904. Ó’Lúing 1991 is an excellent biographical account.

Ó’Lúing, Seán. Kuno Meyer, 1858–1919: A Biography. Dublin, Ireland: Geography Publications, 1991.
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The major biography of Meyer, bilingual scholar Ó’Lúing addresses Meyers’s work for Celtic studies in the German and English academies, while demonstrating how central his influence was for renewed scholarly and popular interest in the Irish language during the period of the Irish Revival. Addresses Meyer’s work to promote other Celtic languages and literatures, particularly Welsh.
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Alice Milligan

An active figure in the Ulster Literary Theatre and a close associate of Douglas Hyde in the Gaelic League, Milligan had been largely neglected prior to the 2000s. McEnulty 2008 (cited under the Irish Dramatic Movement and the Early Works of the Abbey Theatre) examines Milligan’s drama in the context of the Irish Revival in Northern Ireland, but the major study of Milligan is provided in Morris 2012, a work of copious detail.

Morris, Catherine. Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2012.
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An important work of scholarship on the Irish Revival in recent times, Morris recovers the life and work of Alice Milligan during the Irish Revival, one of several figures whose writing was largely neglected by scholars over the course of the 20th century. It is almost as equal in significance for its study of the tableaux vivant in the drama and performances of the Irish Revival as it is for its insights into the figure of Milligan.
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George Moore

Already a novelist of considerable reputation by the first decade of the 20th century, Moore became actively involved in the Irish Revival during those years, his experiences providing extensive materials for his monumental autobiography, Hail and Farewell! The major study of Moore to date is Frazier 2000, an impressive account of Moore’s life and work, including his involvement in the Irish Revival and his relations with Martyn, Hyde, Lady Gregory, and Yeats. Grubgeld 1994 is an important reading of Moore’s literary self-creation. Heilmann and Llewellyn 2014 and Pierse 2006 include a range of new perspectives on Moore that is relevant to his contributions to Celtic Revival in Ireland.

Frazier, Adrian. George Moore, 1852–1933. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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An immense biographical study of one of the influential Irish writers of modern times, this is the best source for discussion of Moore’s involvement in the Irish Revival. Frazier provides excellent accounts of Moore’s relation with Edward Martyn, one of the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre. The book relates Moore’s tempestuous relationship with Yeats in the first decade of the 20th century that proved so influential on Moore in writing his famous autobiography Hail and Farewell!, a seminal text in itself of the Irish Revival era.
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Grubgeld, Elizabeth. George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994.
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Interesting study of Moore’s artistic self-creation through literature. Chapter 5 on Moore’s Hail and Farewell! is particularly relevant to studies of the Irish Revival in the attention that it affords to the parodic mode of Moore’s famous work.
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Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn, eds. George Moore: Influence and Collaboration. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014.
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Excellent collection of essays that addresses Moore’s place in the fin-de-siècle and his interests in painting and music. Of most direct significance to the Irish Revival is the comparison that Kristi Bohata makes between Moore’s The Untilled Field and Cardoc Evans’s My People as contributions to Celtic Revivals in Ireland and Wales.
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Pierse, Mary, ed. George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.
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A fine collection of essays that is of particular relevance to the Irish Revival in the following contributions: Fabian Garcier’s essay on Moore’s The Untilled Field, and Pádraigín Riggs’s essay on the Irish language version of Moore’s short story collection that was published by the Gaelic League.
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D. P. Moran

Of lasting importance for his interventions in public debate during the 1900s over the course of the Irish Revival (see New Editions of Primary Texts), Moran appears intermittently in discussions of Yeats and the Irish Revival. Maume 1995 is the sole book published on Moran to date.

Maume, Patrick. D. P. Moran. Dundalk: Historical Association of Ireland, 1995.
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A fine introduction to the life and thought of Denis Patrick Moran, one of the central figures in debates around the direction that the Irish Revival should take in the first years of the 20th century.
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Sean O’Casey

For full details of work on O’Casey, see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Sean O’Casey” in British and Irish Literature. Murray 2004 is the most comprehensive biographical study of O’Casey’s life and work. Krause 1976 effectively re-creates the Irish Revival era in which O’Casey’s plays were performed. Hunt 1998 is a useful introduction, and Moran 2013 is an excellent critical companion to the plays. McDonald 2004 develops his reading of O’Casey from his earlier work on tragedy and Irish drama.

Hunt, Hugh. Sean O’Casey. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1998.
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Originally published in 1980 as part of the publishing house’s Irish Lives series, this is a useful biographical introduction to O’Casey and his work for the Irish stage.
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Krause, David. Sean O’Casey and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.
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The first biographical study of Sean O’Casey drawing on materials originally published in the 1960s, it is a valuable re-creation of the times during which O’Casey’s plays for the Abbey Theatre were written and performed.
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McDonald, Ronan. “Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: Disillusionment to Delusion.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Edited by Shaun Richards, 136–149. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521804000Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This chapter provides a succinct articulation of the argument centering on tragedy in O’Casey’s plays for the Irish Dramatic Movement that McDonald develops at length in his book on tragedy and Irish drama.
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Moran, James. The Theatre of Seán O’Casey. London: Methuen, 2013.
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A helpful critical companion to the work of O’Casey that is of particular valuable to students and scholars of the Irish Revival in its second chapter, covering the period from 1880 up to the performance of the third play in O’Casey’s so-called Dublin trilogy, The Plough and the Stars.
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Murray, Christopher. Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 2004.
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The major biographical study to date of O’Casey’s life and work. An indispensable work of scholarship for those interested in the Irish Revival as providing the setting for O’Casey’s development as a dramatist for the Abbey Theatre in the 1920s.
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Standish O’Grady

Yeats and George Russell claimed that Standish O’Grady started the Irish Revival. McAteer 2002 is a detailed analysis of O’Grady’s versions of Irish mythology, his political ideas, and their later influence. Hagan 1986 is an excellent account of O’Grady’s treatment of Irish mythology. Maume 2004 looks at O’Grady’s utopian work, The Queen of the World, in terms of his ideas of an Irish Empire.

Hagan, Edward A. “High Nonsensical Words”: A Study of the Works of Standish O’Grady. London: Whitson, 1986.
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The first serious book-length study of the work of Standish O’Grady, of particular importance in the attention that it draws to O’Grady’s attempts to write epics of Irish mythology that would inspire an Irish cultural revival while maintaining a claim to write as a historian.
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Maume, Patrick. “Standish James O’Grady: Between Imperial Romance and Irish Revival.” Éire-Ireland 39.1–2 (Spring–Summer 2004): 11–35.
DOI: 10.1353/eir.2004.0005Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A significant essay on O’Grady, identifying an imperialist set of attitudes in his utopian work, The Queen of the World, that is significant to his writings on Irish mythology, writings that became seminal influences for the Irish Revival at the end of the 19th century.
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McAteer, Michael. Standish O’Grady, Æ and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 2002.
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Examines O’Grady’s writing on Irish mythology and history in terms of historiographic theory. Traces the influence of O’Grady’s thought in the work of George Russell (Æ) and the early poetry of W. B. Yeats.
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Horace Plunkett

As the founder of the Irish Co-operative Movement in 1889, Horace Plunkett was one of the most influential figures in political, economic, and cultural terms during the Irish Revival. A strong supporter of the Irish Literary Theatre, Plunkett also exercised an influence on the Irish policies of the British government during the late 19th century. Shannon 1988 deals with this in the course of a study of Arthur J. Balfour’s policies toward Ireland, examining the influence of Plunkett in winning Balfour’s support for the Irish Co-operative Movement. Kennedy 1996 considers Plunkett’s significance in the context of the relations between the Irish Co-operative Movement and the Catholic Church during the early years of the agricultural organization. West 1986 is the most recent biographical study of Plunkett. See also Mathews 2003 (cited under the Irish Revival).

Kennedy, Liam. “The Early Response of the Irish Catholic Clergy to the Co-operative Movement.” In Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland. By Liam Kennedy, 117–134. Belfast, Ireland: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996.
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Considers the complex range of attitudes among Catholic Church authorities and local clergy in Ireland to the Irish Co-operative Movement and to Plunkett’s hopes for the country’s industrial and economic development.
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Shannon, Catherine B. Arthur J. Balfour and Ireland, 1874–1922. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988.
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An important study of a British political leader during the early period of the Irish Revival from 1887 to 1902. Of particular significance for Balfour’s relations with Horace Plunkett and his support for the Irish Co-operative Movement as part of a “constructive unionist” Irish policy.
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West, Trevor. Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics, an Irish Biography. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1986.
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Examines the life and thought of Horace Plunkett, founder of the Irish Co-operative Movement in 1889, an organization that had strong links to the Irish Revival in the fields of literature and drama, and one that developed rapidly throughout rural Ireland during the period of the Revival.
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George Russell (Æ)

Painter, poet, dramatist, essayist, mystic, and leading figure in Sir Horace Plunkett’s Irish Co-operative Movement during the Irish Revival, George Russell (Æ) is one of the most important intellectual figures of the period. There are two major studies of Russell’s life and work. Kuch 1986 concentrates primarily on his literary work and his relationship with Yeats over the course of a lifetime. Allen 2003 examines Russell as a significant voice in public debate regarding the nature and direction of revival in Ireland. Lane 2004 provides an important critique of the idealization of the Irish peasant in Russell’s writings for the Irish Co-operative Movement. McAteer 2000 and McAteer 2001 also look at the nature of ideology both in Russell’s poetry and in his political thought concerning the movement. Kuch 2011 is a significant collection of Russell’s newspaper and book essays through the Irish Revival period.

Allen, Nicholas. George Russell (Æ) and the New Ireland, 1905–30. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2003.
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A valuable study of the wide range of Æ’s activities during the Irish Revival, weaving together Russell’s writings and editorials on literature, politics, nationality, and cooperation in his newspaper writings for the Irish Homestead and, later, The Irish Statesman.
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Kuch, Peter. Yeats and A.E.: “The antagonism that unites dear friends.” Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1986.
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A vital and original study of one of the most important and influential friendships during the course of the Irish Revival. Kuch brings to the fore the central importance of mysticism to both Yeats and Æ’s reception of Irish mythology, while also demonstrating important differences in attitudes to art and mysticism that took these hugely influential figures in different directions.
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Kuch, Peter, ed. Writings on Literature and Art by G.W. Russell – A.E. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 2011.
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An impressive and illuminating gathering of Russell’s writings on literature and art over several decades, work that testifies to his qualities as a literary and cultural critic and to the formative influence that he exercised during the course of the Irish Revival in the 1900s.
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Lane, Leanne. “There are compensations in the congested districts for their poverty’: Æ and the Idealized Peasant of the Agricultural Co-operative Movement.” In The Irish Revival Reappraised. Edited by Betsey Taylor FitzSimon and James H. Murphy, 33–48. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2004.
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A critical examination of the idealization of the rural Irish laborer in Russell’s writings in the newspaper of the Irish Co-operative Movement, The Irish Homestead.
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McAteer, Michael. “A Split Unity: Gender and History in the Poetry of A.E.” Irish Studies Review 8.2 (2000): 179–194.
DOI: 10.1080/713674239Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the idea of history in Æ’s poetry during the Irish Revival, particularly with regards to the forms of transcendence through which he represented Celtic mystical experience, drawing up the Irish landscape and upon figures from Irish mythology.
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McAteer, Michael. “Reactionary Conservatism or Radical Utopianism? A.E. and the Irish Co-operative Movement.” Éire-Ireland 35.3–4 (Winter–Spring 2001): 148–161.
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A study of the ideological forms that shaped Æ’s writings on the Irish Co-operative Movement, a central component of the Irish Revival.
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J. M. Synge

Synge is the most significant dramatist of the Irish Revival prior to O’Casey. McCormack 2000 is a detailed biographical account, particularly in regard to his Anglo-Irish background and his County Wicklow connections. Mathews 2009 and Cliff and Grene 2012 are excellent edited volumes that address a wide range of topics in relation to Synge’s drama and his famous writings on the Aran Islands. Burke 2009 is a brilliant study of the Irish traveler as represented in Synge’s work of the Irish Revival. Cairns and Richards 1987 explores Celticism in Synge’s drama in its treatment of Irish women, while Kiberd 1993 is the standard work on Synge’s engagement with the Irish language. King 2004 places Synge’s work in relation to Celticism and modernism in a convincing way. Kilroy 1971 is still the best account of the riotous protests that interrupted the performances of Synge’s most famous play at the Abbey Theatre in January 1907, The Playboy of the Western World.

Burke, Mary. “Tinkers”: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566464.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tracing the evolution of discourses of the Gipsy in British and continental European writing since the 16th century, Burke presents a compelling case for the representation of the “tinker” in Synge’s drama as a counter-discourse rather than a realist depiction of tinker life in rural Ireland. In so doing, she opens a whole new perspective on the problem of realism and romanticism, not only in the drama of Synge, but also in the literature of the Irish Revival as a whole.
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Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. “‘Woman’ in the Discourse of Celticism: A Reading of The Shadow of the Glen.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 13.1 (June 1987): 43–60.
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An important reading of feminine identity and experience as presented in Synge’s play in the context of 19th-century discourses of Celticism and with reference to L. P. Curtis’s major study of representations of the Irish in the English Victorian press.
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Cliff, Brian, and Nicholas Grene, eds. Synge and Edwardian Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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A valuable collection of essays that are directed toward the reign of King Edward VII (r. 1901–1910) as an important historical context for understanding Synge and his role in the Irish Revival. While many of the essays fall short in their focus on the Edwardian era itself, the volume contains bountiful and informed reconsiderations of the contexts for understanding Synge’s drama and its place in the Irish Revival.
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Kiberd, Declan. Synge and the Irish Language. 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.
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First published in 1979, this is indisputably the finest study of Synge’s knowledge of the Irish language and its influence on the distinctive syntax of his drama. Furthermore, Kiberd expertly evaluates this influence in relation to the cultural battles over the Irish and English languages within the Irish Revival itself.
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Kilroy, James. The Playboy Riots. Dublin, Ireland: the Dolmen Press, 1971.
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Still the most detailed and factually accurate account of the serious political disturbances at the Abbey Theatre that followed the opening performances of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in January 1907.
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King, Mary C. “J. M. Synge, ‘National’ Drama and the Post-Protestant Imagination.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Edited by Shaun Richards, 79–92. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521804000Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An excellent summary account of Synge as a species of modernist dramatist within the Irish Revival, considering the ways in which his plays move against what the author observes as the idealism of Matthew Arnold’s accounts of Saxon and Celt.
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Mathews, P. J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521110105Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the most impressive volumes in the Cambridge Companion series, this is an essential collection of essays for anyone studying and researching the work of Synge, covering the full range of his writing.
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McCormack, W. J. Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000.
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A comprehensive biography of Synge that succeeds in revising perceptions of Synge’s personality, his work, its place in the Irish Revival, and its legacy.
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Oscar Wilde

Killeen 2005 and Killeen 2007 are the foremost works of the Irish influences in the work of Oscar Wilde that place his life and work in relation to Celtic Revival in Ireland. Markey 2011 develops this in a new direction in drawing contrasts between the use of folklore in Wilde’s fairy tales and in the Celtic Revival writings of Gregory and Hyde in Ireland. McCormack 1998 is a valuable collection of essays on Wilde and Ireland that is particularly relevant in discussions of Irish oral culture and folklore as they relate to Wilde. See also Kiberd 1995 (cited under General Works on Irish Literature That Include the Irish Revival) for important discussion of Wilde, Catholicism, and Celtic revival.

Killeen, Jarlath. The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230503557Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Of relevance to understanding Wilde’s relation to Celtic revival in Ireland through the attention that Killeen directs to Wilde’s time in the west of Ireland in his youth and to his lifelong interest in Catholicism.
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Killeen, Jarlath. The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
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Chapter 4 in this engaging study of Wilde’s fairy tales is of particular value to the study of Wilde’s writing in relation to the ideas of the Irish Revival, including those of D. P. Moran and his “philosophy of Irish Ireland.” Killeen explores some of Wilde’s fairy tales in relation to questions of gender, Celticism, and Irish national identity that preoccupied Moran and others in their debates over the course of the Irish Revival.
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Markey, Anne. Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 2011.
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A valuable study of Wilde’s fairy tales for assessing their relationship to the Irish fairy tale and folklore stories that were promulgated in the Irish Revival by Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, and W. B. Yeats. Insists on fundamental differences in Wilde’s tales to those published by Irish revivalists, yet recognizes the significance of the Irish folklore tradition to Wilde.
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McCormack, Jerusha, ed. Wilde the Irishman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
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This collection includes two essays of immediate relevance to Wilde and the Irish Revival: Deirdre Toomey’s piece on Irish orality as a context for Wilde as storyteller, and Angela Bourke’s comparative consideration of fairy stories, looking at E. F. Benson and Wilde in light of her study of the Bridget Cleary case from the 1890s.
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William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)

A biographer of Shelley and Browning, Sharp contributed stories, poetry, and plays to the Celtic Revival in Scotland that were influenced by the early Yeats, particularly when he adopted the pseudonym Fiona Macleod in the mid-1890s. A significant number of Sharp’s original works are available through Project Gutenburg. Alaya 1970 is the major study of Sharp’s life and work. Halloran 1972 examines the evolution of Sharp’s poetic style into a Celtic mode during the 1890s, and Meyers 1996 makes a strong case for sexual ambivalence as a motive in Sharp adopting the Celtic pseudonym in his creative writing from 1894.

Alaya, Flavia. William Sharp – “Fiona Macleod,” 1855–1905. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
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The most complete study of Sharp’s life and work to date. Deals with the Celticism of “Fiona Macleod” in considerable detail, looking at Sharp’s Celticism in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the writers of the fin-de-siècle.
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Halloran, William F. “William Sharp as Bard and Craftsman.” Victorian Poetry 10.1 (Spring 1972): 57–78.
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Analyzes Sharp’s development as a poet from an early style that was heavily influenced by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti to more carefully crafted verse in later years written under the influence of Yeats and the Celtic Revival in Ireland.
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Meyers, Terry. The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study of the Birth of Fiona Macleod, Incorporating Two Lost Works, Ariadne in Naxos and Beatrice. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
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An engaging study of the emergence of Sharp’s Celtic persona “Fiona Macleod” in 1894. Drawing on two lost works, Meyers argues the case for uncertainties about sexual orientation in advance of marriage as a motive for the creation of this persona.
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W. B. Yeats

For full details of work on Yeats, the most dominant figure of the Irish Revival, see Lauren Arrington’s Oxford Bibliographies entry “W. B. Yeats” in British and Irish Literature. Two major biographical studies, Foster 1997 and Foster 2003, provide extensive and detailed information on Yeats’s activities on behalf of Celtic Revival in Ireland, in London, and during American tours year by year throughout the critical era of the late 1880s to the 1910s. Flannery 1976 is a detailed account of Yeats’s work for the Abbey Theatre in the 1900s and 1910s. Chaudhry 2001 illuminates the ways in which Yeats negotiated political tensions in his press writings during the Irish Revival. Fleming 1995 addresses idealizations of the Irish peasant character in the writing both of Yeats and of Synge. Carlin 2013 develops, beyond the major work of Pethica 2006, to advance an important new interpretation of Cathleen ni Houlihan, one of the most significant plays of the Irish Revival that Yeats co-wrote with Lady Gregory. Marcus 1987 situates Yeats’s work within the Irish Revival, and Pethica 2006 discusses Yeats’s work on Irish folkore and mythology in the Irish Revival. Schuchard 2008 is a compelling and detailed study of Yeats work on voice, music, and performance in collaboration with actors, directors, and composers over the course of several decades.

Carlin, Aisling. “To ‘make others see my dream as I had seen it’: Yeats’s Aesthetics in Cathleen ni Houlihan.” In Yeats’s Mask: Yeats Annual: A Special Issue, No. 19. Edited by Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould, 65–76. London: Open Book Publishers, 2013.
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A crucial reading of the collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory in the composition of their most politically influential play for the Irish Revival of the decade of the 1900s, Cathleen ni Houlihan. Carlin offers an important reassessment of the play in light of the differences between allegory and symbolism as Yeats saw them.
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Chaudhry, Yug Mohit. Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001.
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An important study of Yeats’s writings for different press outlets and important differences in his contributions to newspapers with nationalist or unionist leanings during the Revival era.
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Flannery, James. W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976.
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Republished in paperback in 1989, Flannery drew extensively on archival materials from the National Library of Ireland to provide the most illuminating account of Yeats’s stage practices at the Abbey Theatre during the high point of the Irish Revival in the decade of the 1900s.
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Fleming, Deborah. “A Man who does not exist”: The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
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A postcolonial study of the representation of Irish peasant characters in the writing of Yeats and Synge. Fleming assesses the extent to which representations were literary inventions rather than faithful presentations of rural Irish character in poetry, stories, and plays by these authors.
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Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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This detailed first volume of a biography of Yeats to 1914 is important to studies of the Irish Revival for the forensic accounts that Foster gives of Yeats’s confrontations and interactions with intellectuals in Dublin and in London as the Irish Revival came into fruition during the late 1890s and the decade of the 1900s.
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Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 2, The Arch-poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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Continuing the rich, detailed focus on Yeats’s correspondence from Foster 1997, Foster devotes more attention to Yeats’s literary works in their own right. In the process, he conveys the complexity of emotions through which Yeats regarded the Irish Revival and its later direction as he advanced into old age.
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Marcus, Phillip L. Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987.
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Still one of the best accounts of Yeats’s place in the first phase of the Irish Revival. Of particular value is the attention that Marcus affords to Yeats’s correspondence with such figures as Nora Hopper, Fr. Matthew Russell, John Todhunter, and W. P. Ryan as the Irish Revival was getting under way in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Pethica, James. “Yeats, Folklore, and Irish Legend.” In The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats. Edited by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly, 129–143. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521650895Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a particularly valuable chapter for studies on the Irish Revival, in situating Yeats’s treatment of folklore and mythology in his writing as responses to and interactions with the work of other Celtic revivalists, most notably Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde.
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Schuchard, Ronald. The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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An indispensable book for understanding Yeats’s role in the Irish Revival, in particular for his collaborations during the 1900s on voice experiments that were a distinctive feature of his Irish mythological plays. Schuchard ably demonstrates the profundity of Yeats’s belief in a bardic ideal for poetry, one that drew upon an ancient Irish tradition and also on the medieval English tradition of the troubadour.
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British Celtic Revival

The Celtic Revival in literature and other spheres of cultural activity was by no means confined to Ireland. Indeed, the Celtic Revival of the later 18th century was more pronounced in Scotland than in Ireland. The Scottish Revival gave rise to a major controversy over the authenticity of James MacPherson’s Ossian, one that continued to reverberate in the first half of the 19th century and partly explains why Celtic Revival in Scotland toward the end of the 19th century was overshadowed by the revival in Ireland. Curley 2009 is a fascinating study of the involvement of Samuel Johnson, one of England’s finest writers, in the Ossianic debate, an involvement that opened a significant line of influence to the Irish patriots of the late 18th century. Perhaps the most significant impact of Celtic Revival in England can be seen in Celtic features within the poetry of Lord Byron, William Blake, and Percy Shelley. This reflected Byron’s close association with Walter Scott and the strong influence of Welsh mythology on William Blake. Carruthers and Rawes 2003 brings together a series of illuminating essays on the Celtic influences in the work of the English romantics. Snyder 2013 (originally published 1923) is still a very informative and illuminating account of Celtic Revival in the British Isles in the late 18th century, particularly for its discussion of Welsh poetry from the 18th century. Dewey 1974 is a rare consideration of the influence of Celtic Revival on British prime minister William Gladstone in the late 19th century. Manning, et al. 2007 includes excellent chapters on various aspects of Celtic Revival in Scotland. One of the most important critical evaluations of modern Scottish literature, Crawford 2000 enhances our understanding of the revival of the Scots dialect and the Scots Gaelic language in literature. Putz 2013 looks at how the interpretation of Shakespeare in the writings of Matthew Arnold, Edward Dowden, and W. B. Yeats gave emphasis to a Celtic Shakespeare that was significant to Celtic Revival in Britain and Ireland. Belchem 2000 is a fascinating account of the Manx Celtic Revival in the Isle of Man from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Wood discusses one of the works of Alfred Nutt, one of the most important ethnologists during the period of the Celtic Revival in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the late 19th century. For further discussion of the impact of Nutt and the work of other comparative ethnologists during the period, see Garrigan Mattar 2004 (cited under Social Studies and Comparative Studies).

Belchem, John. “The Little Manx Nation: Antiquarianism, Ethnic Identity, and Home Rule Politics in the Isle of Man, 1880–1918.” Journal of British Studies 39.2 (April 2000): 217–240.
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A unique discussion of the work of antiquarians for the preservation of Manx identity in the context of late Victorian ideas of Britishness and of Celticism as competing cultural forces in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
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Carruthers, Gerard, and Alan Rawes, eds. English Romanticism in the Celtic World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511484131Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A very significant collection of essays, particularly for the Welsh Celtic Revival and English romantic appropriations of Welsh mythologies. The volume also contains important essays on the intersection of Celtic Revival and Orientalism, as well as Celticism in the work of Lord Byron, Blake, and Shelley.
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Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. 2d ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
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Crawford’s absorbing and influential account of the points of connection between Scottish writers and the emergence of English literature as an academic subject is of immense value to considerations of Celtic Revival in Scottish contexts, primarily with reference to the revival of Scots Gaelic and Scots dialect in modern literature as counters to earlier moves to standardize English within the British and Irish regions.
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Curley, Thomas P. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511576461Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A major study of Samuel Johnson’s involvement in the debate over James MacPherson’s Ossian, as well as Johnson’s connections to Celtic Revival and to patriot opponents of Ossian, Charles O’Conor and Thomas Campbell.
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Dewey, Clive. “Celtic Agrarian Legislation and the Celtic Revival: Historicist Implications of Gladstone’s Irish and Scottish Land Acts, 1870–1886.” Past & Present 64 (August 1974): 30–70.
DOI: 10.1093/past/64.1.30Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A unique consideration of the impact that William Gladstone’s land reform bills had on the Celtic Revival movements in Ireland and in Scotland in the late 19th century, this essay has largely been neglected in Irish Revival studies.
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Kelleher, J. V. “Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival.” In Perspectives in Criticism. Edited by H. Levin, 197–221. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.
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The first assessment of the impact of Matthew Arnold’s ideas about the Celtic personality on the Celtic Revival in Ireland, Scotland, and England from the late 19th century.
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Manning, Susan, Thomas Owen Clancy, and Murray Pittock, eds. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Vol 2, Enlightenment, Britain and Empire, 1707–1918. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
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This indispensable volume contains a number of informative sections on Celticism and the Celtic Revival in Scottish literature: Dafydd Moore, “The Ossianic Revival, James Beattie and Primitivism” (pp. 90–98); Murray Pittock, “Irish-Scottish Connections, 1707–1918” (pp. 99–104); Murray Pittock and Isla Jack, “Patrick Geddes and the Celtic Revival” (pp. 338–346).
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Putz, Adam. The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Ireland, 1867–1922. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137027665Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An engaging study of how the perception of Shakespeare’s work in Matthew Arnold, W. B. Yeats, and Edward Dowden exercised a significant influence on Anglo-Irish identity and politics leading into and during the Irish Revival. Reconsiders Joyce’s treatment of Shakespeare in the light of this Anglo-Irish inheritance within certain writings of the Irish Revival.
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Snyder, Edward D. The Celtic Revival in English Literature, 1760–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
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Originally published in 1923. A book that stands the test of time, providing insightful accounts of the development of Welsh, Scottish, English, and Irish poetry during a formative period of the Celtic Revival in the British Isles toward the end of the 18th century. Provides individual chapters on the poetry of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, Thomas Gray, and James MacPherson.
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Wood, Juliette. “Folklore Studies at the Celtic Dawn: The Rôle of Alfred Nutt as Publisher and Scholar.” Folklore 110 (1999): 3–12.
DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.1999.9715976Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A rare examination of a figure whose ethnological writings—along with those of Andrew Lang, James Frazer, and Max Müller—exerted significant influence on the Celtic Revival at the end of the 19th century.
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Pan-Celticism

With Celtic Revival movements active in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man in the late 19th century, several Pan-Celtic societies emerged. A number of essays from the early 1900s on the work and aims of these societies are available through Project Gutenberg. Berresford Ellis 2002 is the major study of Pan-Celticism, its place in Celtic Revival movements, and its relevance to questions of political devolution in the United Kingdom. Barré 2007 addresses Celtic language revival movements in terms of relations between populist and elitist features. O’Leary 1986 and Hughes 1953 address the activities of Pan-Celtic societies from the later 19th century. Stover 2012 looks at how Pan-Celtic movements reacted to the First World War and how they were affected by it. Rio, et al. 2008 examines the Arthurian legend from the medieval period for considerations of cultural memory and orality in the Celtic “regions” during the Celtic Revival periods of later centuries. MacMullen 1965 is an archaeological account of the Celtic Revival in continental Europe in the post-Roman era. Koch and Minard 2012 is an important reference source for people and works relating to Celtic Revival throughout Ireland, Britain, and Brittany, with useful entries on Pan-Celticism.

Barré, Ronan. Les langues celtiques, entre survivance populaire et renouveau élitiste? Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007.
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An important critique of Celtic language revival movements in the Pan-Celtic regions. Addresses the question of language use itself in relation to the revival of Breton, Irish, Scots-Gaelic, Manx, and other Celtic languages. Considers intellectually elite characteristics of the organizations that have promoted these languages as a problematic issue for their survival in regions where they are officially recognized.
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Berresford Ellis, Peter. Celtic Dawn: The Dream of Celtic Unity. Rev. ed. Talybont, Wales: Y Lolfa, 2002.
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Originally published in 1993. This is an invaluable and sympathetic appraisal of the Pan-Celtic movement in the 20th century, addressing cultural and political questions dealing with Celtic languages and identities in Galicia, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Brittany, and Cornwall.
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Hughes, J. B. “The Pan-Celtic Society, 1888–1891.” The Irish Monthly 81.953 (January 1953): 15–20.
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In this close analysis of this society that later merged into the Irish Literary Society, Hughes considers the figures involved and the influence of earlier ideas of the Young Ireland movement.
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Koch, John T., and Antone Minard, eds. The Celts: History, Life, and Culture. Vol. 1, A–H. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012.
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An excellent reference work, this volume contains copious references to Celtic writers, stories, and legends, in addition to entries on the Pan-Celtic movement in Ireland, Scotland Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man.
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MacMullen, Ramsey. “The Celtic Renaissance.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 14.1 (1965): 93–104.
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An important archaeological account of the revival of Celtic art and design in the later 2nd and in the 3rd centuries CE that predate the Roman conquest of western Europe. The essay is especially important to the field of Celtic studies in noting the influences—as well as the differences—among Celtic, Greek, and Scythian styles during this period.
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O’Leary, Philip. “‘Children of the Same Mother’: Gaelic Relations with other Celtic Revival Movements, 1882–1916.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 6 (1986): 101–130.
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Close consideration of how the movements to revive the Welsh and Scottish languages influenced the work to revive the Irish language from the 1880s, particularly that of the Gaelic League.
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Rio, Joseph, François Chappé, and Frañch Postic, eds. Mémoire, oralité, culture dans les pays celtiques: La legende arthurienne, le celtisme: Actes de l’université européenne d’été 2002, Université de Bretagne-Sud, Lorient. Rennes, France: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 2008.
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An engaging study of the development of the Arthurian legend in Wales in the medieval period and its place in the Celtic Revivals of Wales, Scotland, and the English regions in later centuries. The authors address questions of cultural memory and oral culture in the Celtic “regions.”
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Stover, Justin D. “Modern Celtic Nationalism in the Period of the Great War: Establishing Transnational Connections.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 32 (2012): 286–301.
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Considers the fate of Pan-Celtic movements during the First World War. Notes how the Celtic Literary Society, the Pan-Celtic Congress, and the Celtic Association tried to develop international relations for the various cultural nationalist organizations within Ireland, Britain, and Brittany in the years before the outbreak of the First World War and how the war affected their activities and outlooks.
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Celtic Revival in Art, Design, Music, and Sport

Beyond literature, drama, and language, the Celtic Revival was strongly evident in the fields of art, design, music, and sport from the late 19th century. This was particularly the case in Ireland, but by no means exclusively so. Indeed, as studies of the Arts and Crafts movements in Ireland show, a major influence and inspiration was William Morris in London. The Irish Revival saw the emergence of celebrated painters in Ireland such as Jack B. Yeats and Sarah Purser, taking their influences from such sources as the expressionism of Vincent Van Gogh, but investing their work with a distinctive Irish character. Particularly in Ireland, Celtic Revival saw intense collaborations across the arts, with theatre performances and literary publications involving Celtic design motifs or special musical arrangements distinguished by Celtic airs. These ventures were sometimes conducted in relation to the ideals and practices of the Irish Co-operative Movement, which was founded by Horace Plunkett in 1889. Celtic Revival in music was evident in two spheres: the development of Celtic motifs in opera, most notable the compositions and recitals of Charles Villiers Stanford, and the Feis Ceoil, a new competition in the 1890s to promote traditional Irish folk music. Without doubt the major success in the field of sports during the Irish Revival was the rapid development of the Gaelic Athletic Association (Cumann Lúthcleas Gael. GAA), founded by Michael Cusack in 1884. As with the Gaelic League, the GAA would exert an enormous influence in Irish society through the course of the 20th century.

Art and Design

Craft industries, painting, and design were a major component of Celtic Revival in Ireland and Scotland. Ireland’s most famous modern painter, Jack B. Yeats, emerged from the Irish Revival movement. Bedient 2009 explores the relationship between the literature of W. B. Yeats and the painting of Jack B. Yeats. Brown 2011 situates W. B. Yeats firmly in the milieu of the Arts and Crafts movements of the Irish Revival era. Addressing the Cuala Press and Dun Emer publishing and design industries in this regard, Brown also looks at Yeats’s collaboration with painter Norah McGuinness. Her work reexamines the later painting of Jack B. Yeats in the light of this study. O’Grady 1996 discusses the work of painter Sarah Purser from the Irish Revival era, while Morrison 2003 examines the role of painting in the Celtic Revival in Scotland toward the end of the 19th century as part of a larger consideration of the role of painting in Scottish nationalism since 1800. Gordon Bowe 1989 and Gordon Bowe and Cumming 1998 are the best studies of craft and design during the Celtic Revival, particularly for the attention that the authors give to William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement in England as a major source of inspiration. Gordon Bowe and Cumming 1998 is also important in mapping the influences and interactions between Dublin and Edinburgh during the Celtic Revivals in Ireland and Scotland. Bowe and Helland 2004 provides an excellent discussion of Celtic design as aristocratic fashion during the Celtic Revival era, and Walker, et al. 2013 provides a fascinating account of Celtic design in jewelry manufacturing during and after the Celtic Revival.

Bedient, Calvin. The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
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Examines the painting of Jack B. Yeats in relation to the poetry of his brother, W. B. Yeats. The book explores the ways in which both the paintings and the poems reflect upon one another in figuring motion as an evocation of chaos.
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Brown, Karen. The Yeats Circle, Verbal and Visual Relations in Ireland, 1880–1939. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011.
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A brilliantly detailed consideration of visual artistic influences on W. B. Yeats’s work for Celtic Revival in Ireland. Addresses Yeats’s collaborations with the Irish painter Norah McGuinness; examines the Dun Emer and Cuala industries during the Irish Revival; explores relations between words and images in the later work of Jack B. Yeats.
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Gordon Bowe, Nicola. “Two Early Twentieth-Century Irish Arts and Crafts Workshops in Context: An Túr Gloine and the Dun Emer Guild and Industries.” Journal of Design History 2.2–3 (1989): 193–206.
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An excellent account of the art and design aspect of Celtic Revival in Ireland that was developed through these influential cooperative enterprises in the first decade of the 20th century, from which emerged a new movement in stained-glass window design and the influential Dun Emer Press.
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Gordon Bowe, Nicola, and Elizabeth Cumming. The Arts and Crafts Movements in Dublin and Edinburgh, 1885–1925. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 1998.
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Rich and detailed discussion of the Arts and Crafts movements as part of the Celtic Revival movements in Ireland and Scotland at the end of the 19th century. Examines such important ventures as the Dun Emer home industries created by the Yeats sisters, the Celtic Twilight paintings of Æ, the stained-glass window designs of Harry Clarke, Celtic embroidery design, and the paintings of Jack B. Yeats.
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Helland, Janice. “Embroidered Spectacle: Celtic Revival and Aristocratic Display.” In The Irish Revival Reappraised. Edited by Betsey Taylor FitzSimon and James H. Murphy, 94–105. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2004.
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Examines Lady Ishbel Aberdeen’s promotion of Celtic design and embroidery in the 1880s as part of her support for Home Rule, bringing ideas of aristocratic luxury to the Celtic Revival. The essay is particularly rich in its discussion of reactions to and promotion of Lady Aberdeen’s Celtic Revival activities in the London and Dublin press during the 1880s.
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Morrison, John. Painting the Nation: Identity and Nationalism in Scottish Painting, 1800–1920. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
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Discusses the development of Scottish painting during the course of the 19th century in great detail and includes an important chapter on the contribution of Scottish painters to the Celtic Revival at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
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O’Grady, John. The Life and Work of Sarah Purser. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 1996.
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Examines the life and work of one of the foremost Irish women painters of the Irish Revival era and the first woman member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Gives a vivid account of Purser’s salon in Mespil House, Dublin, as a meeting point of leading writers, politicians, and revolutionaries in the 1900s.
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Walker, Stephen, Tara Kelly, E. Mairi MacArthur, and Aidan Breen. The Modern History of Celtic Jewellery, 1840–1940. New York: Walker Metalsmiths, 2013.
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Illuminating account of the manufacture of facsimiles of medieval Irish metalwork in 19th-century Dublin, works that had a major impact on Celtic jewelry industry subsequently. Also examines the foundation of modern Scottish Celtic jewelry through Alexander and Euphemia Ritchie on the island of Iona at the start of the 20th century.
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Music

Celtic Revival in Ireland was particularly striking in the field of music. The Feis Ceoil inaugurated competitions in all fields of traditional Irish music that would pave the way for the formation of the national organization, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann later in the mid-20th century. Celtic Revival was also evident in the field of opera. Dibble 2002 includes a chapter that examines Charles Villiers Stanford’s 1896 Irish opera, Shamus O’Brien. Dowling 2014a and Dowling 2014b provide detailed discussion of the Feis Ceoil, the revival of piping music with the festival of Belfast Pipers, and the activities of the Gaelic League in relation to the revival of traditional music in Ireland. White 2008 surveys the broad spectrum of the musical landscape in Ireland during the Irish Revival period, including the tensions between the European classical repertoire of the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the activities of the Feis Ceoil. Burke 2006 is an engaging discussion of music and musicians as treated in the literature of the Irish Revival, particularly the recurrent image of the blind fiddler. Porter 1998 is a valuable consideration of the ideology of Celticism in traditional Irish music and song as we regard it during the period of the Irish Revival. Vallely 1999 is the best source-book for traditional Irish music, containing entries on musicians and groups from the period of the Irish Revival.

Burke, Mary. “Mad Irish Fiddlers in Paris: Music and Wandering Musicians in Irish Revival Writing.” In Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Leon Litvack and Colin Graham, 160–172. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2006.
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Assesses the trope of the Gypsy as wandering musician in 19th-century continental European literature and music as an important influence on the Irish Revival, particularly through the medium of Synge and the time that he spent in Paris. Burke is one of the only scholars to identity the influence of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian “Gypsy” compositions on Celtic motifs in the literature of the Irish Revival.
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Dibble, Jeremy. Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 271–329.
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The first major study of one of the most important performers and composers in England in the 1880s and 1890s. An acquaintance of Brahms and teacher of Vaughan Williams, Stanford has largely been neglected in regard to the Irish Revival both in his native Dublin and in London. Chapter 8 examines the success of his Irish opera, Shamus O’Brien, in England and in Ireland in 1896.
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Dowling, Martin. “Music in the Revival: The Feis Ceoil, the Gaelic League, and the Pipers.” In Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives. By Martin Dowling, 151–208. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014a.
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Chapter 3 provides a detailed account of the promotion of traditional Irish music during the Irish Revival through the Feis Ceoil (music festival), the work of the Gaelic League, and the Belfast Pipers.
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Dowling, Martin. “Traditional Music in the Irish Revival.” In Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond. Edited by Mark Fitzgerald and John O’Flynn, 39–52. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014b.
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A detailed discussion of the various groups and activities associated with traditional Irish music during the Irish Revival. Draws on theories of culture from Adorno and others in evaluating the revival of traditional Irish music.
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Porter, James. “Locating Western Music and Song.” Western Folklore 57.4 (Autumn 1998): 205–224.
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A perceptive critical consideration of the idea of Celtic music, and the relations between music and song, that is of particular significance to the Irish Revival, when the idea of the musical spirit of the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish traditions was promoted widely.
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Vallely, Fintan. The Companion to Irish Traditional Music. 2d ed. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1999.
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Contains a wide range of informative entries on traditional Irish musicians and groups from the period of the Irish Revival.
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White, Harry. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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An indispensable work for understanding the influence of music on Irish Revival literature and beyond, originating from the compositions of Thomas Moore early in the 19th century.
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Sport

The major sports event marking the Celtic Revival was the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in Ireland in 1884 to organize and promote sports native to Ireland, particularly the ancient sport of hurling and of Gaelic football. Cronin, et al. 2014 and Mandle 1987 are the two most important studies of the GAA in social, political, and historical terms. Mandle 1987 is of particular significance for the period of the Irish Revival. De Búrca 2000 is an impressive historical survey of the organization from its origins in the 1880s through the course of the 20th century. Garnham 2004 investigates the reasons for the dramatic development of the GAA during the years of the Celtic Revival in Ireland in the 1880s and 1890s. Moore 2012 traces the changes in attitude in the GAA through the involvement of Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, in the association.

Cronin, Mike, Mark Duncan, and Paul Rouse. The GAA: A People’s History. Cork, Ireland: Collins, 2014.
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Drawing on previous scholarship and on new archive materials relating to the origins of the Gaelic Athletic Association in the 1880s, this book is of immense value in understanding Ireland’s foremost national sports organization in relation to the Irish Revival and its political contexts at the end of the 19th century.
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De Búrca, Marcus. The GAA: A History. 2d ed. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 2000.
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A major historical survey of the Gaelic Athletic Association through the course of the 20th century, it contains illuminating discussion of the development of the association during the decades when the Celtic Revival in Ireland was at its height, from the 1890s to the 1910s.
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Garnham, Neal. “Accounting for the Early Success of the Gaelic Athletic Association.” Irish Historical Studies 33.133 (May 2004): 65–78.
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Perceptive account of the factors that influenced the dramatic development of the GAA as a cultural sporting organization in Ireland in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Mandle, W. F. The Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish Nationalist Politics, 1884–1924. London: Christopher Helm, 1987.
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A brilliant study of the social complexities of the GAA in its early years and the crucial role it played at the local level in Ireland in supporting militant Irish nationalism, particularly the Irish Republican Brotherhood, during the period of the Irish Revival.
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Moore, Cormac. The G.A.A. v Douglas Hyde: The Removal of Ireland’s First President as G.A.A. Patron. Cork, Ireland: Collins, 2012.
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An interesting examination of how the GAA evolved in its ideology from the period of the Irish Revival into the 1930s in focusing on Douglas Hyde and his relationship to the association during these decades.