Fascinating womanhood 19223/16/2024 ![]() ![]() Here, class and gender politics have played second-fiddle. ![]() The compelling postcolonial politics of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland-a context of acute political disenfranchisement and disenchantment-has produced an over-focus on high politics and important men, and in writing, on those works that sent out ‘certain men the English shot’. If the eminent Revivalist’s self-aggrandisement has been deflated by histories of the period, the prism through which the Irish Revival is understood nonetheless invariably takes on an androcentric lens. Yeats, ‘all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891’, when ‘the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation.’ Yeats portrayed himself as something of a Prospero figure whose poetic sorcery ‘troubled’ the ‘race’, though Roy Foster and others have drawn attention to the chronological inaccuracies in the Abbey doyen’s neat sense of causation here. Amid the efflorescence of Irish writing that emerged during the Irish Literary Revival, an enchanting epochal image conjures one great man passing the burden of Irish national renewal on to another. Irish intellectual life was revitalised in the tumultuous decades of revival and revolution covered by this important book. Irish Women’s Writing 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty, edited by Anna Pilz and Whitney Standlee, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016, 280 pp., £70.00 (hardback), ![]()
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