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.