(Download) "Affiliated to the Future? Culture, The Celt, And Matthew Arnold's Utopianism (Critical Essay)" by Utopian Studies * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Affiliated to the Future? Culture, The Celt, And Matthew Arnold's Utopianism (Critical Essay)
- Author : Utopian Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 214 KB
Description
Throughout the oeuvre of Limerick writer Gerald Griffin (1803-1840), the supernatural vacillates between acceptability and enlightened explicability. The Collegians, Griffins novel of 1829, takes the supernatural and neutralizes it into a quaint trade-off between reason and imagination: Viewed as a charming weakness, superstition is presented as a kink in the otherwise rational world-view of the emerging Irish Catholic middle class. Terry Eagleton has derided the "bogus pastoral" of The Collegians, with all of its "fustian periods and laboured Latinisms," as a fiction which seeks to prove Irish middle-class respectability against an unspecified and unspecific colonial prejudice (204). Certainly, the class issue is central; the movement from the (often violent) gothicism of Griffin's shorter fiction to the genteel realism of The Collegians mirrors a movement from a dispersed local narrative to a macro-narrative where the fantastic is facetiously absorbed into the bourgeois novel as mere superstition. Sneering at Griffin's "amiable English sentiment" (234), William Butler Yeats would resurrect the pre-modern elements of Irish culture to produce an alternative narrative vividly divergent from the seemingly staid culture of Victorian England; equally, Yeats' aesthetic distanced itself from the anaemic representational compromise which Griffin's novelistic work embodied. "Reality you know is all the rage now," wrote Griffin to his brother Daniel (The Life of Gerald Griffin 157). The fashion for factuality certainly influenced The Collegians in terms of inspiration (the story was based on a well-reported incident in Clare in 1809) and in terms of tone, as in the quotation above. The struggle against this fad for sensible middleclass realism was to become the quickening force behind the Celtic Revival. As a cultural energy, Celticism was a disavowal of factual class mentality. The writers of the revival developed notions of the Celtic into an otherworldly, utopian tradition where no coherent lineage had existed previously.
 "Affiliated to the Future? Culture, The Celt, And Matthew Arnold's Utopianism (Critical Essay)" by Utopian Studies * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}