CE301C: CELTIC ENCOUNTERS: THE GAELIC WORLD IN IRISH AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE (2023-2024)

The encounter with the Gaelic past is a central part of the modern Irish and Scottish literary traditions. In Ireland, the mid-nineteeth century was marked by the rise of the Irish Literary Revival and the rediscovery of the Gaelic past. Writers as diverse as James Clarence Mangan, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde were engaged in a project of cultural reawakening that would culminate in the creation of an independent Irish state. Their writings helped to mould the nation-in-waiting, and to forge a common Irish identity transcending the political divisions of the day. Translations from the Old Gaelic sagas proliferated, and folklore collectors gathered much valuable material.

In Scotland, the Scottish Literary Renaissance was led by the firebrand modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and aimed to replace a jaded narrative of Scottish culture (symbolised for MacDiarmid by the sentimental cult of Robert Burns) with a dynamic and politically assertive vision of modern Scotland. Even as writers celebrated the past, however, they were also reimagining it. The encounter with the past was both a return to the source and an act of marketing – a version of Irishness and Scottishness these writers could sell to the world.

The term ‘Celtic’ used in the course title and also in the Celtic Twilight of the 1890s is one indicator of the slippage involved in handling the Gaelic past. In the Scottish context, the term ‘Celtic’ can be usefully dated to University of Aberdeen graduate James Macpherson and his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760). Macpherson was widely attacked for having fabricated his sources, and for trading in a form of pseudo-Celtic mystique. The controversies that ensued marked Scottish culture deeply. In the transition from Gaelic origin to ‘Celtic’ adaptation something has been repurposed, and lost or gained, and understanding this process will be central to the course.

While the course will range widely over historical periods, there will be a focus on the modern and contemporary. Thus, we will examine versions of the medieval saga Buile Suibhne (‘Sweeney Astray’) produced by Seamus Heaney and Trevor Joyce, and use the contrast to study approaches to translation in contemporary Irish poetry. Nor is the process of influence studied exclusively from Irish/Gaelic into English. In looking at the work of Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid, we will study the influence of Irish poetry on Scottish writing in both Gaelic and Scots. MacLean was profoundly influenced by Yeats, while in his poetry of the 1930s (e.g. To Circumjack Cencrastus) MacDiarmid pursues a vision of a fully integrated Gaelic consciousness combining all the strands of Irish and Scottish, Gaelic and Scots-language culture. In more recent writing, we will look at the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, its powerful historical reflections, and the ways in which these are refracted back onto contemporary questions. Other authors will include the younger contemporary writers Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose ‘auto-fiction’/novel A Ghost in the Throat is a haunting to the Gaelic eighteenth century, and ‘MacGillivray’ (Kirsten Norrie), the Scottish poet whose Gaelic Garden of the Dead is both a profound elegy for the Jacobite Risings and an innovative contribution to avant-garde poetics. Other genres as well as poetry and fiction will be covered, such as the writing of Tim Robinson, the adoptive Irish cartographer, whose studies of the West of Ireland (Aran Islands/Connemara) combine cartography, cultural geography, history, ecocriticism and a genre he termed ‘geophany’.

The picture that emerges from the course will be one of a long civilisational arc from the medieval period to the present day, rooted in history but uniquely hospitable to the reinventions that have driven Irish and Scottish writing so dynamically through this period.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

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There are no assessments for this course.