Boland, Eavan - Ann Owens Weekes (essay date 1994)
Ann Owens Weekes (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: Weekes, Ann Owens. “‘An Origin like Water’: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Modernist Critiques of Irish Literature.” Bucknell Review 38, no. 1 (1994): 159-76.
[In the following essay, Weekes applies Richard Kearney's theory about the connection between Irish Revivalism and modernism to Boland's poetry.]
In his excellent study, Transitions (1988), Richard Kearney explores the tensions between Revivalism and modernism in twentieth-century Irish narratives. Revivalism is associated with Yeats's attempt to present a unity of culture by privileging “primordial images of ancient Celtic mythology which predated all subsequent historical divisions into different religious (Catholic/Protestant) or political (Nationalist/Unionist) beliefs.”1 Modernism, on the other hand, is associated with Joyce and Beckett's denial of “the possibility of sustaining a continuous link between...
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