Irish Literary Revival

The Irish Literary Revival, also called the Celtic Revival, was a flowering of Irish literature in English from the 1890s through the 1920s that sought to recover and reimagine Ireland's Gaelic myth, folklore and cultural identity as the basis for a distinctively Irish national literature, in the context of the broader movement toward Irish political independence. Its central figures, William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge, founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904 as the movement's institutional home, staging plays that drew on Irish myth, peasant speech and rural life, while Yeats's own poetry moved from early Celtic-twilight mysticism toward a harder, more modern style over the movement's course. The Revival also encompassed the Gaelic League's efforts to revive the Irish language and figures such as George William Russell, known as AE, and, at its edges, the young James Joyce, and it is generally credited with establishing modern Irish literature in English as a body of work independent of, though still in dialogue with, the wider British literary tradition.