著者

日下 隆平

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

人間文化研究 = Journal of humanities research St. Andrew's University (ISSN:21889031)

巻号頁・発行日

no.2, pp.245-276, 2015-03-23

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The Victorian-era Scottish poet James Thomson (1834-1882), who wrote under the pseudonym "B.V.", is best known for his long poem The City of Dreadful Night. Although the poem had the power to attract readers, it was full of pessimistic and uncanny elements. When the first half of the poem was published in the National Reformer in 1874, such dominant literary figures as William Michael Rossetti and George Eliot expressed their admiration, but the remainder of the poem failed to appear because of its being "so alien from common thought and feeling" (Thomson). The evaluation of a poet might be said to depend on how much space is devoted to his/ her poems by The Oxford Book of English Verse. While Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch selected only four of Thomson's short poems for the 1900 edition, in 1972 Helen Gardner chose to include every line of "Proem", along with parts of "Section 1" of The City of Dreadful Night. Such editorial decisions indicate that the poem had come to be esteemed much more highly than before. T. S. Eliot played an important role in this change of evaluation. This paper deals primarily with the echoes of Thomson's work in The Waste Land and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Eliot read Thomson's poems during his formative years between the ages of 16 and 20, along with the works of another Scottish poet, John Davidson. Thomson drew parallels between Dante's Inferno and The City of Dreadful Night by quoting the inscription over the gate of Dante's Hell as the poem's Epigraph. In addition, the city as image which Thomson used in the poem inspired Eliot to write both The Waste Land and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." In part 1, the changing evaluation of The City of Dreadful Night is discussed, followed by the Epigraph and "Proem" (part 2), the image of the City in "Section 1" (part 3), and the synopsis of The City of Dreadful Night (part 4), and Surreal City and Unreal City (part 5).

著者

日下 隆平 Ryuhei Kusaka 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

桃山学院大学総合研究所紀要 = ST.ANDREW'S UNIVERSITY BULLETIN OF THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE (ISSN:1346048X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.29, no.1, pp.1-14, 2003-07-15

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In recent years, there has been a growing inclination to re-examine the nineteenth-century Celtic Revival in colonial England. The goal of this study is to discuss the meaning of Celtic Revival through the work of William Butler Yeats. He was a distinguished figure of this movement and a descendant of Anglo-Irish family. He felt the necessity to reconcile the Protestant Ascendancy and the Irish Catholic tradition in his mind. Yeats wrote a famous essay in which he expressed his response to On the Studies of Celtic Literature by Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s writing was important to Yeats because he mystified the Celtic character and introduced the Celtic idea as a differentiating fact between Ireland and England. Arnold attempted to bring about ‘healing measure’ by blending the delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic peoples with ‘Philistinism’of British middle-class. The mystification of the Celt becomes, in effect, the romanticizing of the Irish Catholic in Revivalists. Yeats tried to discover an aristocratic element within the Protestant Ascendancy and to associate this with the spiritual aristocracy of the Catholic and Celtic peasantry in his mind. In the first chapter, the Irish identity under colonialism will be examined. In the second chapter, Arnold’s Celtic essay will be discussed. He admitted the femininity and the spirituality of Irish Celt into the British character. In the last chapter, I will examine Yeats’s prose based on the Celtic material. He knew from O’Grady’s writing that there was the bardic tradition in Ireland. The bard (in Irish file or ollamh) was ‘highly trained in the use of a polished literary medium.’ The monks and even the abbot in the monastery are afraid of a wandering poet’s rhyme in ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast.’ This is derived from the legend that people in the old Gaelic society were afraid of the satire of the file poet. Finally, his attempt to ennoble the Irish peasantry, as represented in the Irish folklore and legend, can be accounted for by the same logic that Arnold admitted the Celtic sensibility into the national character. This is, at the same time, true of his Ireland he invented in Celtic Revival.

著者

日下 隆平 Ryuhei KUSAKA 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = English Review (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.16, pp.197-218, 2001-12-20

著者

日下 隆平 Ryuhei Kusaka 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

no.17, pp.3-28, 2002-12-20

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At the fin de siecle, the Celtic Revival was complex and multifaced movement, comprising a variety of approaches to the representation of Irish identity. In this paper, the influence of Matthew Arnold on the Celtic Revival will be mainly explored. He created a stereotyped image of the Celt as a “shy, sensitive and imaginative” race. The Irish people have greatly changed their image from what they used to be in the eighteenth century. The image of Irishman in England can be traced back to the age of Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift. Yahoo represents the savage people whom Jonathan Swift described in Gulliver's Travels (1726). The description of the Irishman as Yahoo was found in the cartoons and writings of the eighteenth century. Eiren, on the other hand, was a gloomy and beautiful woman, with long and dark hair. She was often drawn in the cartoons of the magazines at 1890s. The inclination for nostalgic representations of the Celt could be found in the figure of Eiren. In the first section, the discovery of the Celtic motif will be discussed in connection with the rise of Irish nationalism in the middle of the eighteenth century. The traditional Irish symbols such as the Celtic Cross, harp, and Irish wolfhound, will be referred in the poems and paintings. In the second section, I will deal with the image of the Irishman as Yahoo, in Gulliver's Travels and the cartoons of Punch. In the last section, the Celtic Revival and the transformation of the Irish image at the end of century will be discussed. The figure of Erin suggested Irish femininity itself. This figure of Erin cannot be separable from Arnold's opinion. As a critic points out, the Celt is a construct based on oppositions such as wild and tame, savage and civilized, or idealist and utilitarian. In this paper, an ambivalence in English attitude towards the Celt will be also explored.

著者

日下 隆平

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.9, pp.113-138, 1994-12-20

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In recent years, there has been a growing inclination to re-examine the way that Irish exiles was perceived by British contemporaries in colonial England. The purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between Irish exiles and British dreamers at the end of the nineteenth century. The image of Ireland in the colonial age was derived from the Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser. While he had distaste for the rebel Irish, he regarded the charming landscape of Ireland as an Arcadia. This Spenser's point of view was sustained by William Makepease Thakeray and Anthony Trollope. At the end of the nineteenth century, some British people used Ireland as a stage for their dreams and ideas, such as Ann Horniman and Maud Gonne. Their viewpoints were based on a kind of colonialism. It is no exaggeration to say that 'Celticism' might be approximated to 'Orientalism'. In the 1880s, a certain kind of Irish literary emigrant was advancing to prominence. Oscar Wilde, George B. Shaw and W.B. Yeats were three examples of a breed which can be traced back to middle-class Irishmen on the make, who were mainly engaged in the journalistic profession in England. They were not the average Irish emigrant. One of the typical examples was Justin McCarthy who migrated from Cork journalism into the world of Fleet Street, and afterwards became a Parnellite MP. W.B. Yeats spent his youth travelling back and forth between England and Ireland. His view of Ireland is inseparable from his emigrant status. Consequently, he could discover or re-create the image of Ireland, as seen in The Shadowy Waters. M. Gonne, who had spent her childhood in Ireland, was magnetized to the revolutionary era in Ireland. She identified Ireland's independence with her own independence. In this study, therefore, the interaction between Yeats and Gonne will be dealt with as one between an exile and a dreamer.

著者

日下 隆平

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.12, pp.25-46, 1997-12-20

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social changes in the later nineteenth century had a great impact on Yeats, through his literary works. Yeats was brought up in the ancien regime: Victorian, Protestant, Ascendancy Ireland. The Ascendancy, here, represented the dominant Irish Protestant class. Some of them were Anglo-Irish absentee landlords of the ruling class. Yeats's family, which had a farm in Kildare, belonged to the Ascendancy, too. His youth spanned the period that inaugurated the decline of this Irish Ascendancy, as the outbreak of the Land War then shows. This paper is made up of three sections: In the first, Yeats's sensitivity to the times, such as the sense of an ending, is illuminated in such poems as "The Second Coming". In the second section, I make it clear that the apocalyptic vision which can be seen in the poem is derived from the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. In the last section, the process in which Yeats came to identify himself with Jonathan Swift is dealt with. Swift's Gulliver, who was isolated between Yahoo and Houhyhnhnm, represents a symbolic figure for the "Ascendancy which was both colonized and colonialist", to use Eagleton's words. Yeats regarded him as an example of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and followed him.