Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism
Yeats, Joyce, MacDiarmid and Jones

Analyzes the complex role receptions of antiquity had in forging nationalist ideology and literary modernism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Gregory Baker (Author)

9781009364980, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 July 2023

322 pages
27 x 18 x 2.1 cm, 0.539 kg

'Celtic Modernism and Classics is impressive … Baker uncovers the fascinating variety in the nationalist and language-revival movements of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries … Baker does an excellent job of resisting the temptation, far too easy in a monograph of this sort, of finding an easy overall thesis to cover these disparate writers.' Stephanie Nelson, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics

Celtic modernism had a complex history with classical reception. In this book, Gregory Baker examines the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to show how new forms of modernist literary expression emerged as the evolution of classical education, the insurgent power of cultural nationalisms and the desire for transformative modes of artistic invention converged across Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Writers on the 'Celtic fringe' sometimes confronted, and sometimes consciously advanced, crudely ideological manipulations of the inherited past. But even as they did so, their eccentric ways of using the classics and its residual cultural authority animated new decentered idioms of English - literary vernaculars so fragmented and inflected by polyglot intrusion that they expanded the range of Anglophone literature and left in their wake compelling stories for a new age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. 'A noble vernacular?' Yeats, Hellenism and the Anglo-Irish nation
2. 'Hellenise it.' Joyce and the mistranslation of revival
3. 'Straight Talk, Straight as the Greek!' Ireland's Oedipus and the modernism of Yeats
4. 'Heirs of Romanity:' Welsh nationalism and the modernism of David Jones
5. 'A form of Doric which is no dialect in particular:' Scotland and the planetary classics of Hugh MacDiarmid.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1]