In chapter three, Andrew Kalaidjian explores the idea of cultural renewal by rethinking its efficacy in literary texts. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries some critics and artists, such as James Joyce, regarded Revival writers and artists as purveyors of a romantic vision of Ireland and interpreted their work as efforts to return to a bygone era of cultural purity. While some latter-day revivalist writers, such as Flann O’Brien and Brian Friel saw the literary revival as compromised by Yeatsian romanticism, others sought in W. B. Yeats’s work a way to move forward without romanticizing the past. The chapter considers literary and cultural texts of the late twentieth century – including Seamus Heaney’s poetry, brochures published by the national turf company Bord Na Móna, the plays of the Field Day Company – as resources for writers in the later twentieth century who sought a foothold in the past during times of sectarian violence.