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170 pages

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Emerging at a moment of escalating colonial conflict between England and Ireland, the figure of the Irish Celt enjoyed a long and varied career in both English and Irish literature from the late Victorian era to World War II. While this figure assumes many forms and functions, T. J. Boynton argues that he is consistently cast as inherently resistant to capitalism. Beginning with an innovative reassessment of Matthew Arnold's The Study of Celtic Literature, from which the book also takes its title, Against the Despotism of Fact offers new readings of major works by writers such as Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. In their writing, Boynton argues, the Irish Celt served as a transnational vehicle of modernist experimentation geared toward interrogating the imperial, social, and pop-cultural dimensions of capitalist modernity. Making a significant contribution to Irish studies, modernist studies, and postcolonial studies, Against the Despotism of Fact draws attention to not only the prevalence but also the critical potential of this fraught figure.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Celticism, Capitalism, and Transnational Modernism

Part I: British Celticism

1. Matthew Arnold, the Ontology of English Capitalism, and the Rebirth of Celtic Tragedy

2. The Uses of Irishness, I: British Imperial-Romantic Celticism

3. The Uses of Irishness, II: British Modernist Celticism

Part II: Irish Celticism

4. "A Nation of Imitators": Anticapitalisms of the Irish Revival, 1885–1910

5. "In Front of the Cracked Looking-Glass": Revivalist Modernism, the Irish Female Consumer, and the Colonial Spectacle

6. The Bathetic Muse: Irish Late Modernism

Conclusion: Post-Celticism

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Royaume-Uni

Great Britain

Stephen Ireland

United Kingdom

Ireland

Reino Unido

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438481821
Langue	English

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AGAINST THE DESPOTISM OF FACT
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
AGAINST THE DESPOTISM OF FACT
Modernism, Capitalism, and the Irish Celt
T. J. BOYNTON
Cover image: © Estate of Jack B Yeats. All rights reserved, DACS / ARS 2020
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boynton, T. J., [date] author.
Title: Against the despotism of fact : modernism, capitalism, and the Irish Celt / T. J. Boynton.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2021. | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017922 | ISBN 9781438481814 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438481821 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Irish authors—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—Ireland. | Celts in literature. | Capitalism in literature. | National characteristics, Irish, in literature. | Nationalism and literature—Ireland. | English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | English literature—20th century—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PR8722.M6 B69 2021 | DDC 820.9/9415—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017922
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: Celticism, Capitalism, and Transnational Modernism
I BRITISH CELTICISM
1 Matthew Arnold, the Ontology of English Capitalism, and the Rebirth of Celtic Tragedy
2 The Uses of Irishness, I: British Imperial-Romantic Celticism
3 The Uses of Irishness, II: British Modernist Celticism
II IRISH CELTICISM
4 “A Nation of Imitators”: Anticapitalisms of the Irish Revival, 1885–1910
5 “In Front of the Cracked Looking-Glass”: Revivalist Modernism, the Irish Female Consumer, and the Colonial Spectacle
6 The Bathetic Muse: Irish Late Modernism
Conclusion: Post-Celticism
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the product of more than a decade of work, work which began during my time as a student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which continued during my time at DePauw University and Marshall University, and which I have completed at Wichita State University. I would like to thank my former professors, fellow graduate students, my colleagues, and my students for providing stimulating and challenging environments along the way.
More specific thanks must begin with two mentors from my time at Illinois. The first is Joe Valente, whose exemplary scholarship and intellectual vigor have been an inspiration since the moment I first heard him speak. Joe’s guidance during the writing of the dissertation out of which this book grew was indispensable. The second is Jed Esty, who has been an equally inspiring example of intellectual and scholarly achievement, and whose tutelage in modernism in particular was formative for me. Both Joe and Jed have continued to provide crucial assistance in bringing this book to fruition during its latter stages.
The other members of my dissertation committee also played valuable roles in the project’s conception and development: Jim Hansen, whose guidance in Irish Studies, critical theory, and Beckett helped it take methodological shape; Lauren Goodlad, whose input into the earlier, Victorian reaches of its narrative helped solidify its foundation; and Vicki Mahaffey, whose contributions during my defense provided valuable insight regarding its later, Irish modernist chapters.
More recently, Mark Quigley has provided valuable input into the project. As one of its few additional, non-anonymous readers, his positive response has provided valuable affirmation and encouragement.
I would be remiss if I did not also mention the three key mentors of my undergraduate years at the tiny liberal arts school of Monmouth College in Illinois: Craig Watson, Mark Willhardt, and Rob Hale. You three helped mold my thinking about literature at a pivotal time, and I continue to look back fondly on our years together.
I must also thank my editors at SUNY Press, Rebecca Colesworthy and, before her, Amanda Lanne-Camilli. Your help in ushering the project through the review and revision process has been pivotal in it reaching its potential.
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in ELH in 2013, while an earlier version of a portion of chapter 5 appeared in É ire-Ireland in 2012. I thank the journals for permission to include those materials here.
Excerpts from the poetry of W.B. Yeats are reprinted with the permission of Simon Schuster, and the cover image of Jack B. Yeats’s “A Word of Advice”/“The Plough and the Earth Spirit”/“The Woodchopper and the Tree Spirit” by George Russell (AE) is reproduced with the permission of the Artists’ Right Society.
I dedicate this book to my mom, Sally Faye Boynton (1951–2007), who, in addition to being one professionally, also served as my first English teacher. I also dedicate it to my dad, Tom, and my brother and best friend, Alex.
Introduction
Celticism, Capitalism, and Transnational Modernism
Sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, at a fortuitous intersection between the emergence of Victorian anthropology and the escalation of colonial conflict between England and Ireland, begins the career of a unique and remarkably prolific literary figure. At different points of his history, this figure can be found engaging bravely yet haplessly in tribal warfare; sitting rapt in poetic communion with nature; held captive in a London zoo; surveying a prehistoric landscape from a South American tree; suppressing insurrection in colonial India; mediating racial tensions aboard a British merchant ship; serving as a religious idol in an anticolonial Mexican revolution; protesting the influence of popular culture in turn-of-the-century Ireland; modeling the ideal citizen of the twentieth century’s first postcolonial state; or deceased, with his decapitated head being worshipped in ritual dance. This is, by any measure, a distinguished record—of service domestic and foreign; military and civilian; rural and urban; real and mythological; political, cultural, and aesthetic; dramatic, poetic, and fictional—and displays a versatility, indeed a virtuosity, difficult to match in the record of modern literature. Yet this figure’s achievements have yet to receive full recognition, and where they are noted, they are often denigrated.
More persistently than any of the above labors, this figure may be found performing one special task prior to his retirement sometime around World War II. Beyond his prominent role in buoying aesthetic values in a utilitarian age or in shaping the rising, incipiently global forces of anticolonial struggle, this figure was deployed to combat the harmful effects of modern capitalism. At a time when capital’s evolution had begun to issue in the technological forms of the second industrial revolution and the pop-cultural manifestations of the culture industry, this figure became central to a widespread effort to comprehend and combat the perils of these processes. If the variety of this figure’s employment during the period from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries is without peer among his literary contemporaries, the steadfastness of his nearly century-long devotion to gauging and altering the course on which capital had set the world is even more so.
The figure to whom this sketch refers is the Irish Celt. Like many of the ancient deities in which he is thought to have believed, he displays a remarkable shape-changing capacity throughout the extensive archive of British and Irish texts he populates during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Across the various guises he assumes in his globetrotting heyday, however, his antagonism to the forces of capital is a constant. This book traces the history of the Irish Celt, reconstructing from his diverse manifestations in British and Irish literature his service to the cause of criticizing capitalism’s depredations during the colonial, postcolonial, modern, and postmodern periods. The record of this service is a fascinating study of the Irish Celt’s entanglement with some of the most significant civilizational arcs of the modern and contemporary eras, and of his utility for comprehending and criticizing them. In the hands of both British and Irish writers, the Irish Celt served as an unparalleled resource for thinking through the ramifications of imperial/colonial history and the economic forces driving and shaping that history. A study of the astonishing variety of ways in which these writers cultivated this resource thus enables a novel account of some of the most influential works of modern literature in English while also providing a window into some of the most pressing historical problems of the last two centuries.
As indexed in this capsule biography, this book takes the literary history of the Irish Celt as a