Little nuggets, though, do redeem me. Plus, I've suddenly developed a crush on Joe Cleary despite being wildly annoyed by the sections of Outrageous Fortune that we had to read:
"For many Irish scholars--whether liberal or leftist, republican or revisionist--the most embarrassing aspect of the Revival is its folk culture idiom, its nativist or romantic nationalist tones, its 'backward look' to the western seaborad or to imagined worlds of the Irish peasantry or of Celtic epic and saga. All this lends Revivalist literature an archaic coloration distinctly at odds with conventional ideas of modernism as the brashly iconoclastic and cosmopolitan art of new times, new cityscapes, new materials, new technologies. In other words, if we take the 'shock of the new' as the defining signature of modernism, then the Revivalist neoromantic celebration of the peasantry, the countryside, the Big House, all seem to be distinctly at odds with the modernist currents of the time." [p. 221. Cleary, "Toward a Materialist-Formalist History of Twentieth-Century Irish Literature"]
Thank god someone articulated it for me. I was going crazy not being able to say that.
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