The many roles which Edward Martyn filled in order to realize his dreams of reform in the Irish Revival are comprehensively explored in this collection of essays. Martyn's roles included host, patron, novelist, playwright, satirist, aesthete, collector of books and pictures, benefactor, journalist, and theatre director. His many activities, often forgotten or misunderstood, are documented here and set forth, for the first time, in the wider context of the multifaceted movement of Irish cultural nationalism which involved Martyn in developing relationships with fellow revivalists such as George Moore, Lady Gregory, Arthur Griffiths, D. P. Moran, Standish James O'Grady, and W. B. Yeats. This distilled analysis of the origins, development and failure of many of Martyn's reforms extends to a probing of the roots of Ireland's failure to achieve cultural independence during the 1920s and 30s when the very type of provincialism which Martyn so vehemently opposed because the conventional wisdom of the newly independent Irish Free State.

Ibsen and the Irish Revival examines Henrik Ibsen's influence on the Irish Revival and the reception of his plays in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Dublin. It highlights the international dimension of the Irish Literary Revival and offers new perspectives on W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lennox Robinson, James Joyce, George Moore and Sean O'Casey.

Women, Press, and Politics explores the literary and historical significance of women writing for the most influential body of nationalist journalism during the Irish revival, the advanced nationalist press. This work studies women’s writings in the Irish national tradition, focusing in particular on leading feminine voices in the cultural and political movements that helped launch the Eater Rising of 1916: Augusta Gregory, Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz, Delia Larkin, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, and Louie Bennett. Karen Steele argues that by examining the innovative work of these writers from the perspective of women’s artistry and women’s political investments, we can best appreciate the expansive range of their cultural productions and the influence these had on other nationalists, who went on to shape Irish politics and culture in the decades to come.

Uniting Catholic Ireland and Protestant Ireland was a central idea of the "Irish Revival," a literary and cultural manifestation of Irish nationalism that began in the 1890s and continued into the early twentieth century. Yet many of the Revival's Protestant leaders, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge, failed to address the profound cultural differences that made uniting the two Irelands so problematic, while Catholic leaders of the Revival, particularly the journalist D. P. Moran, turned the movement into a struggle for greater Catholic power. This book fully explores James Joyce's complex response to the Irish Revival and his extensive treatment of the relationship between the "two Irelands" in his letters, essays, book reviews, and fiction up to Finnegans Wake. Willard Potts skillfully demonstrates that, despite his pretense of being an aloof onlooker, Joyce was very much a part of the Revival. He shows how deeply Joyce was steeped in his whole Catholic culture and how, regardless of the harsh way he treats the Catholic characters in his works, he almost always portrays them as superior to any Protestants with whom they appear. This research recovers the historical and cultural roots of a writer who is too often studied in isolation from the Irish world that formed him.

Rev. ed. of: Notes for Joyce: an annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses, 1974.

Although the policy has frequently been dismissed as either incoherent or inconsequential, it very nearly succeeded in its objectives and certainly brought about a profound transformation in the political, social, and economic landscape of Ireland."--BOOK JACKET.