Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Mr Casey's tears
- 1 Dublin Fenianism in the 1880s: ‘the Irish culture of the future’?
- 2 Parnell and the Fenians: structuring the split
- 3 ‘Parnell's Old Brigade’: the Redmondite–Fenian nexus in the 1890s
- 4 Literary Fenianism and Fenian faction: ‘In the past of a nation lives the protection of its future and the advancement of its present’
- 5 The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
- 6 Fenian orthodoxies and volunteering, 1910–14: ‘Not coming believe volunteers will kill home rule’
- Epilogue: Fenian song and economic history
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Literary Fenianism and Fenian faction: ‘In the past of a nation lives the protection of its future and the advancement of its present’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Mr Casey's tears
- 1 Dublin Fenianism in the 1880s: ‘the Irish culture of the future’?
- 2 Parnell and the Fenians: structuring the split
- 3 ‘Parnell's Old Brigade’: the Redmondite–Fenian nexus in the 1890s
- 4 Literary Fenianism and Fenian faction: ‘In the past of a nation lives the protection of its future and the advancement of its present’
- 5 The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
- 6 Fenian orthodoxies and volunteering, 1910–14: ‘Not coming believe volunteers will kill home rule’
- Epilogue: Fenian song and economic history
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It has become a truism in Irish history that the death of Parnell marked a watershed. Yeats gave the most famous and most frequently quoted expression to this insight in his 1923 Nobel lecture:
The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought that prepared for the Anglo-Irish war, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived; and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event's long gestation.
Yeats shared this historicising mindset with many of his contemporaries and it is interesting to find that the specific shape Yeats later imposed on the development of Irish nationalism after 1891 was anticipated by William Rooney in the 1890s. Proto-Sinn Féiner and Irish language enthusiast, Rooney addressed the Celtic Literary Society on 20 January 1899 using the metaphor that Yeats would make his own:
Some little semblence of interest in the tongue of the Gael marked every generation before ours; but we, with our backs turned to everything native, our eyes perpetually on the parliament of the foreigner, dazed by joyous anticipation of a ‘Union of Hearts’, forgot everything but the shibboleth of the hour, and were gradually degenerating into mere automata, until a crash came, and in the rending of the veil we saw for the first time what was before us and paused.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 , pp. 96 - 129Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006