![]() ![]() His faith in Irish nationalist politics and in Catholicism was broken even as it was formed, and soon he launched himself beyond the pales of both, by exile and apostasy, proclaiming that each had betrayed his trust. ![]() Despite his disdain for contemporary political and literary enthusiasms, his dismissal of Celtic myths as “broken lights,” his characterization of the folk imagination as “senile,” and his relative ignorance of the Gaelic language, however, his imaginative works are as thoroughly and distinctively Irish as those of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, or Lady Augusta Gregory.įrom his earliest childhood, Joyce was aware of the political controversies of the day, observing the conflict between the idealized Charles Stuart Parnell and the ultramontane Church that permanently marked his outlook on Irish public affairs. The first to deal with this latter theme realistically, Joyce made a bold show as a “Europeanizer” and openly criticized “patriotic” art. It did no more than gesture toward Europe, and it registered very little of the atrophied state of middle- and lowerclass city life. The emphasis of the Revival in its early stages on legendary or peasant themes and its subsequent espousal of a vaguely nationalistic and unorthodox religious spirit kept it at a certain distance from popular pieties. Very few were Catholics, and none was from the urban middle class, except James Joyce. The leaders of the Irish Literary Revival were born of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. ![]()
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