Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Some tanning and due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Deep in the Celtic soul is the image of a hero who seems to be defeated but is not defeated. In a favourite Irish myth the mortally-wounded Cuchulain ties himself to a rock to die standing and laughing at a raven slipping in the blood from his wounds triumphs over death. Charles Stewart Parnell became a hero of the same archetypal kind. His party crumbled beneath him when he was on the verge of winning Home Rule for Ireland in 1890; a few months later he was dead. Yet Parnell lived on as a hero in the minds of the younger generation of Irishmen and the lull in political activity which followed his death gave them the time and the opportunity to imagine and strive for a completer natural unity than any known in Ireland before or after Strongbow’s invasion in 1169 began the long centuries of English domination. One way of working for unity was to revive the ancient Irish language and publish translations of its myths legends and folk-lore. Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League for this purpose in 1893 and in the same year he published Love-Songs of Connacht a work which revealed the distinctive qualities not only of Gaelic poetry but of the Irish English into which he had translated it and encour- aged Lady Augusta Gregory and J. M. Synge to use the English spoken in the west of Ireland as a medium for drama. To W. B. Yeats the prime founder of the Irish Dramatic Movement the cultural unity of his nation was especially to be created by dramatizing Irish myths and legends and by their performance awakening heroic passions dormant in the racial memory. The thesis of this brief essay is that the finest plays of the Irish Dramatic Movement have remained true to this desire to reveal to Ireland her better or inner self and that they have done so either by making ancient myths strike chords in the modern