In his chapter, Gregory Castle explores the cultural need for heroism expressed by W. B. Yeats and Alice Milligan at a time (the first decade of the twentieth century) when hope for the future was an explicit component of revivalist discourse across the arts and the political spectrum. Yeats’s In the Seven Woods (1903) offers a vision of legendary and contemporary heroism in which love and desire are transformed in a process in which the experience of beauty and its loss, as well as the representation of this experience, become heroic endeavors. In Milligan’s Hero Lays (1908), heroism does not rely on a transposition of love into the context of heroism. Rather, her vision is informed by political activism; her poems mine the ancient legends for a model of heroic action that would be suitable for the nationalist cause of her own time. For both poets, the heroic ethos of the legendary past is sustained as part of the contemporary poet’s bardic responsibility.

In her chapter, Pilar Villar-Argáiz shows how the poetry of Eavan Boland often invokes the very revivalism she seems at times to critique. Villar-Argáiz examines a number of Boland’s poetic predecessors in order to show her multiple points of contact with the Irish past. Though Boland engaged critically with W. B. Yeats’s revivalism, particularly as reflected in the “lyric imperative” that runs throughout his work, her posthumous published collection The Historians represents a partial reconciliation with Yeats’s work and poetic example. This reconciliation allows Boland to celebrate what she inherits from Yeats – particularly his use of use poetry to create a sense of community, not only among other writers but more broadly among the Irish people at large. Boland’s work strives for this sense of community, of belonging through relationships with landscape and “domestic interiors. In her late twentieth century revivalism, Boland thus revitalizes the bardic function so important to Yeats.

In chapter one, Brian Ó Conchubhair offers an examination of the metadiscourse “Revival” as a concept and the relation between revivalism and periodization. Narratives of revival too often repeat inaccurate narratives of Irish culture, to the point that our understanding of the Irish past, of Irish institutions and landscapes, suffers from unexamined conclusions about the Revival’s social and political efficacy and from images and tropes of Irishness that modern critics inherited from early revivalists. This is particularly apparent in the conception, promoted by some early revivalists, of the West of Ireland as a site of authentic Irishness. Indeed, in the Gaeltachtaí (Irish speaking regions), which have long been idealized as a stronghold of original or pure Irishness, a kind of zombification has taken place, one that in some ways displaces the long tradition of antiquarian and archaeological projects of cultural renewal and restoration.

In her chapter, Heather Laird examines twenty-first century commemorations, such as the bicentennial of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the centennial of the Easter Rising of 1916. From the time of the peak era of Revival to the present, a vision of Ireland has emerged that values tradition but that also reckons with the failures of tradition to govern modern lives. The statues and exhibitions that arose in preparation for these celebrations are the visible signs of the very future envisioned in 1798 and 1916. Laird’s examination of twenty-first century commemorations of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and the commemoration of it in 2013 suggests that revivalism resists this idea of cultural salvage and actively serves a world to come. She discusses two 2013 commemoration projects, Living the Lockout and the 1913 Lockout Tapestry, latter-day manifestations of a persistent revivalist impulse to make the past productive of the future.

In her chapter, Rosie Lavan explores Eavan Boland’s relationship to two post-Revival poets, Padraic Fallon and Sheila Wingfield. These under-studied writers occupy an insecure position with respect to the legacies of the literary revival, particularly the work of Yeats. This was especially true of Fallon who believed Yeats’s influence to be deleterious to poets who followed him. As many critics have pointed out, Boland’s engagement with the Irish poetic tradition, particularly its emphasis on male mastery, is both powerful and ambivalent, for despite the critical gaze she trains on this tradition she is able to recognize and make use of Yeats’s poetic bequest. As Lavan shows, Wingfield provided a counter influence in the sense that her work depicted the struggle with the pressures of time. To resign herself to time, Boland came to understand, is to come to a fuller understanding of how she defines herself as a poet.

In chapter two, Helen O’Connell explores the idea of cultural repression as an unintended consequence of a program of language and cultural renewal. Too often, the early Irish Revival promoted the rewards of cultural renewal without at the same time emphasizing the hard work of education and social improvement that such renewal entailed. Revivalists such as Douglas Hyde and D. P. Moran attempted to reverse social and cultural decline by creating resources out of the cheerless forbearance, that is to say, the suffering of ancestors, all in the name of an Ireland free of any debased and debasing foreign culture. Hyde and Moran were dedicated to the Irish language and the importance of elevating Irish culture and Irish industries and both advocated the rejection of deleterious English influences. But each occupied a different position: one was an Anglo-Protestant and the other a Catholic, one minimized politics and ideology, the other amplified both.

In his chapter, Luke Gibbons examines artists and writers who take up the subject of the “great scar” of the Civil War, and in their work he finds silence, misdirection, and the kind of temporal indeterminacies that are characteristic of so much revivalist cultural production. By examining literary and cinematic works by Louis D’Alton, Liam O’Flaherty, John Ford, and Dorothy McCardle, Gibbons argues that temporal discontinuity has a positive role to play by reactivating that which history has deactivated. Civil War literature invites the reader to go beyond the surface realism of the text in a way that provides an opening to the real, which in Lacanian terms is foreclosed and mapped over by imaginary constructs. Gibbons’s consideration of Irish literature and film strongly suggests an alternative to conventional realist accounts beholden to historical causality, a way of reading the temporal discontinuity in way that offers a fresh perspective on the trauma of the Civil War.

In chapter four, Sean Williams illustrates the creative potential of music and dance for the development of revivalism up to the present day. During the early years of the Revival, beginning in the 1890s, Irish dance and music were governed by strict ideas about form and performance promulgated by such groups as the Gaelic League. Music and dance, in different ways, underscore the difficulties of remaining connected to traditional standards while allowing the introduction of modern or non-Irish elements in singing style, dance steps, and instrumentation. At each stage of the development of cultural revivalism, cultural authenticity is vitally important. Despite apparent ruptures in the traditions of music and dance, both have flourished on a world stage with their “Irishness” intact. Because of the inclusion of non-Irish dance and vocal styles, a contemporary spectacle such as Riverdance, while quite different from traditional forms of dance, remain connected to broader revivalist concerns.

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.

Eoin Flannery, in his chapter, examines what happens when the revivalist promise of the future has curdled into something else, an inevitability of history rather than the positing power of the artist. It is one thing to accept a faded ideal as the motivating trope of a latter-day revivalist novel; it is quite another thing to turn away from ideals altogether and to accept, even to embrace, a world defined less by cultural aspirations than financial schemes, debt and “ecosickness.” The refusal to adopt traditional revivalist reference points and temporal frameworks leads writers as diverse as Kevin Berry, Anne Haverty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and Mike McCormack to offer narratives that range from financial degradation to social collapse. One result of this refusal is the effort to foreground language, style, voice, and the vitality and exuberance of storytelling that is a hallmark of revivalist art, an advancing light into a potentially dark future.

Heather Ingman, in her chapter, explores W. B. Yeats’s legacy in the construction of the myth surrounding the Big House, the country estates that served as a potent symbol of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy rule in Ireland. The Big House novel, which rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century, created over the ensuing two hundred years new grounds of recognition for the iconic Georgian structures that presided over vast demesnes until the Land Wars and the War of Independence altered forever the Anglo-Irish landscape. Ingman shows how the Yeatsian myth of the Big House was undermined in novels by, among others, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnston, William Trevor, and John Banville. But even in the process of dismantling the myth, these novels retained a small portion of the Big House’s cultural value because its symbolic value could be taken for granted, if only to transform it.

In her chapter, Elizabeth Crooke examines the work of nineteenth-century antiquarian scholar George Petrie and the poet and archivist Samuel Ferguson, who were vital to the formation of a modern revivalist movement. The accumulation of knowledge about the Irish past is a condition of freedom, for it stands as a bulwark against false and degrading historical representations and frees Irish institutions to use the recovery of cultural artifacts to support the process of national Bildung. Museums connect the past, through present cultural activity, to the realization of Ireland’s national future. This connection motivates the early designers of museums and other cultural institutions charged with preserving cultural artifacts to regard authenticity as a quality of cultural objects, an aura that transcends historical conditions. During the Decade of Centenaries (2012–2022), Petrie and Ferguson became themselves a part of Ireland’s future in the form of commemorations, the visible signs of institutional memory.

Giulia Bruna, in her chapter, offers a comparative framework for discussing the different strategies of J. M. Synge and Emily Lawless for achieving an authentic representation of the otherworldly geography of the Aran Islands, which was so much a part of the folklore of the region. Synge’s The Aran Islands, often treated as a spiritual autobiography, offers a way of reading the West of Ireland that complicates our understanding of authentic Irishness. While he derives a sense of authenticity through largely documentary and ethnographic rather than fictional means, Lawless, in Grania, captures an authentic sense of rural Ireland through the formal arrangements of the novel. Bruna is concerned with identifying, in Synge’s and Lawless’s work, modes of plural and dialogic authenticity that recognizes the “parasitic” relation of culture to nature. Bruna concludes that their versions of authenticity, though different in methodology, serve the same revivalist purpose of shaping Irish cultures for future generations.

In this chapter, Catherine Morris focuses on the Revival as part of a revolutionary era in Irish history, an era that saw the formation of national identity and national institutions. She shows how revival feminism links the freedom of Ireland to the freedom of women by focusing on the artistic work and social and political thought of neglected or under-studied feminists and activists such as Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, and Helena Molony. Prominent in this group of activist feminists was Alice Milligan. Milligan’s writings offer a rich context for grasping the idea that activist feminists shaped the Revival and provided an intersectional political space for women. She provides a way to reconsider the importance of the Irish Revival and to emphasize forgotten or neglected elements of it. Morris’s research on revival feminism, but especially her work on Milligan, becomes itself part of the revivalist continuum of political engagement.

In this chapter, Ben Levitas investigates forms of distance and temporal indeterminacy legible in the latter-day revivalist drama of Marina Carr and Brian Friel. In their works, strategies of distance, of “paratheatricality,” seek not to avoid representation but to link it to more authentic experiences for the audience. Both playwrights create a theatre of hope, a theatre for and of the future that testifies to a continuance of the Revival’s main themes and concerns (particularly with respect to time), despite their rejection of the idealism of so many early revivalist works. Friel and Carr achieve a transposition of dramatic life from the stage to the audience – that is to say, from the stage to actual life – which is, in its turn, captured in the dramatic work. Theatrical words are forms of political action insofar as strategies of performative distance and alienation find their place in dramatic productions that support a “grammar of change.”

In his chapter, Christopher Morash examines the modern myth of Revival, which takes the form of what Roland Barthes calls a new “mythic concept.” A good example of this form of myth is the story Yeats tells of meeting Synge in Paris, a meeting that Morash claims did not necessarily have to take place in order for the story to acquire a mythic function. A more substantial instance of the myth of Revival emerges from Synge’s interest in philosophy and science, particularly the work of Herbert Spencer, which enabled him to create a mythic vision of nature based on the ambivalent relationship between the observer and natural world they observe. Synge’s reading of Spencer ultimately leads him to confront early on a central problem of later modernist writers, that is, the instability of the subject/object relationship and the “ambivalent revival” of the observer’s perspective in aesthetic production.

In her chapter, Maureen O’Connor shows how feminist revivalists, in their writings and political work, experienced the Irish landscape and nature as powerful forces in the conception of “Irishness.” Revival feminists give voice and prominence to the supernatural, which has long been a component of Irish folklore. While writers such as Alice Milligan, Ethna Carbery, Eva Gore-Booth, and Hannah Lynch were critical of the dominant revival narrative – particularly when it romanticized rural Ireland and its “rustic” landscape or created gendered stereotypes about the land and Irishness generally – their work nevertheless embodied the revival insofar as it focuses on how time and political struggle are embedded in the landscape. The critique of violence and masculine power is especially important in works by latter-day revivalists such as Eilís Dillon and Edna O’Brien, who take aim at masculinist conceptions of the struggle for Irish freedom in the War of Independence and in late-twentieth century conflicts in Northern Ireland.

Joyce’s life spans a period when material conditions, political structures, and intellectual life throughout the world were profoundly shaped by the growth and decline of European empires and the flourishing of various nationalisms, both imperialist and anti-imperialist. When Joyce was born in 1882 the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the era that one influential historian has called the ‘age of empire’ had just begun. When he died in 1941 the world was engulfed in WWII, a conflict that would fundamentally alter the balance of global power, and the age of decolonization was under way. A good deal of influential Joyce scholarship has explored Joyce’s relation to this historical trajectory. Much of it has been informed by postcolonial studies, committed to examining the complex set of issues and questions we can group under the general headings of ‘colonialism’ and ‘nationalism’. Ireland’s double status as both centre and periphery, agent and victim of colonialism is important to any investigation of how Joyce’s works engage with such issues and questions.

Festivals are one of the main contemporary forums in which Indigenous Australian public ceremony is staged, learned, shared and increasingly, revived. In this chapter we review the literature on public ceremony at Indigenous festivals, focusing on Junba at the Mowanjum festival in the Kimberley and Kun-borrk/Manyardi at the Stone Country and Mahbilil festivals in western Arnhem Land/Kakadu. We consider festivals as serving several purposes: Firstly, as a forum for cultural revival, reclamation, and maintenance, supporting language and song revival and reclamation work by local individuals, groups and Indigenous businesses. Secondly, as a forum for education and diplomacy, serving as powerful statements of Indigenous sovereignty, identity, law and diplomacy which educate the broader public. Thirdly, as a site for continuity and innovation of practice. We examine how performers in the Kimberley use Junba to transform society to address inequity and discrimination in wider Australian society, and performers in western Arnhem Land use Kun-borrk/Manyardi at festivals to support interdependence and reciprocity enacted as part of regional ceremonial practices and ideologies of being ‘different together’.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.