Irish Literature Since 1800 by Vance Norman;

Author:Vance, Norman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1710613
Publisher: Routledge

Chapter 5

James Joyce and the New Ireland, 1920–1960

Thanks to Wilde and to Moore, as well as Mallarmé and Flaubert, the dangerously intoxicating gospel of art was now available as an attractively cosmopolitan supplement or alternative to Ireland’s other new gospel of Celtic revivalism. Either or both could partly replace flagging belief and observance, whether Catholic or Protestant, at a time when both nationalist and unionist politics were becoming identified with particular forms of religion. This gave comfort to writers, including Yeats himself, who were increasingly uncomfortable with the narrowness of the new political dispensation after the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 which concluded the Anglo-Irish War and formally inaugurated the new Irish state. When Cardinal MacRory proclaimed in 1931 that the Protestant Church in Ireland was ‘not even part of the Church of Christ’, and rabid northern preachers continued to insist that the Roman Catholic Church which dominated the social and moral life of southern Ireland was ‘idolatrous’, it was some relief to serious writers and readers of liberal and critical instincts to feel that Literature could provide a different source of value and identity. In this, as in so much else, James Joyce (1882–1941) helped to show the way.

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