Literature in Context. Lecture 10 Period Study Literary History Cultural Memory Postcolonial Studies...

Literature in Context

Lecture 10

Period Study

Literary History

Cultural Memory

Postcolonial Studies Literatures in English


Period Study, Literary History, Cultural Memory,

Literatures in English, Postcolonial Studies, Literary

Translation are interrelated notions or approaches to

the study of literature.

They are attempts at a scientific approach to literature,

they propose related ways of a systematic study of

literature and its phenomena.


University curricula:

based on literary kindsbased on literary periodsbased on individual authorsbased on literary theoriesbased on social context

Literary PeriodsDominant Qualities

Defining literary periods: based on dominant qualities.Dominant qualities colour most elements of intellectual life in a given culture at a certain

time – also influence art, music, architecture, landscape gardening, philosophy, politics, etc.

• a few broad tendencies in common at a high level ofabstraction

• with individual, temporal, local variations• subordinate currents exist as well as dominant ones• declining and emergent energies

e.g. New Historicism takes this line of study

How to examine a literary period: how it is framed by a set of significant events

The Renaissance in England, for example:

• the first visit of Erasmus (1499), • Caxton's printing press at Westminster (1476), • the discovery of America (1492), • the court of the young Henry VIII

(on the throne: 1491-1547), • the Protestant Reformation, • Copernicus's new astronomy (1543), • the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

How to examine a literary period: priorities in its views

• features certain priorities in its views concerning the world and art

• e.g., in Classicism: balance, form, proportion, propriety (good taste, good manners correctness, otherwise known as decorum), dignity, simplicity, objectivity, rationality, restraint, responsibility (rather than self-expression), unity (rather than diversity)

How to examine a literary period:views of humans, favourite genres

• promotes a certain view of humankind

e.g., in Romanticism: the celebration of the individual

• uses specific genres (rather than others)

e.g., in 19th c. Realism: the novel with its details, its particularisation of the lives of ordinary people

How to examine a literary period:favourite subjects, favourite forms

• favours certain subjects for arte.g., in Modernism: inner individual perception (impressionistic presentation, stream ofconsciousness technique, such as in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway)

• shows characteristic formal elements (including the• example above)

e.g., in Postmodernism: Narcissistic narrative:intruding into one's own fiction to ponder uponits powers

A literary trend may not correspond exactly to a culturalperiod, e.g., Postmodernism and the Post-Modern Period.

Literary period: horizontal or vertical study

• The study of High Modernism• 1928 in literature in England

in the historical context of the UK

in the artistic or social or political context of

continental Europe

in the life of Virginia Woolf• The history of literature

The history of literature

history of literature: a series of literary periods

connections may be established among texts (see “Leda and the Swan”)

allusion, intertextuality: interdependence of texts through genre, conventions vs traditional notions of influence: study of direct sources

How is literature read, or judged?

Yet another way of looking at literature: how it was read, by whom, how it was judged

• readership, horizon(s) of expectations (Hans Robert Jauss)

• How do you judge a piece of literature? Do you have to? Should you? Can you avoid doing so? How do you select a work or period to be studied? Can evaluation change reading? Can evaluation prevent reading?

• How are literary canons formed? • Literary canon – selection, exclusion, promotion

Period Study. Literary History.

"Dates and periods are necessary to the study anddiscussion of history, for historical phenomena areconditioned by time and are produced by the sequenceof events. […] But, unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts.They are retrospective conceptions that we form aboutpast events, useful to focus discussion, but very oftenleading historical thought astray.”

G. M. Trevelyan: English Social History.Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1942) 1970, 107

Literary Histories

A few examples

Michael Alexander:A History of English Literature.

Third Edition. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Saintsbury, George: A Short History of English Literature. London: Macmillan, (1898) 1953

The Preliminaries of English Literature• The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Poetry• Caedmon, Cynewulf, and Those about Them• Angol-Saxon Prose• The Decadense of Anglo-Saxon

The Making of English Literature• The Transition• First Middle English Period (1200-1250)• Second Middle English Period (1300-1360)• Early Romances – Metrical

5. Early Romances – Alliterative

Saintsbury, cont.

Chaucer and His Contemporaries1. Chaucer’s Life and Poems2. Langland and Gower3. Chaucer’s Prose – Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville

The Fifteenth Century1. The English Chaucerians – Lydgate to Skelton2. The Scottish Poets – Historical, Political, and Minor3. The Four Great Scottish Poets (The King’s Quair, Henryson,

Dunbar, Douglas)4. Later Romances in Prose and Verse5. Minor Poetry and Ballads6. Miscellaneous Prose

Saintsbury, cont.

Elizabethan Literature to the Death of Spenser1. Preliminaries – Drama2. Preliminaries – Prose3. Prelminaries – Verse4. Spenser and His Contemporaries5. The University Wits (Peele, Green, Marlowe, Kyd, Lodge, Nash)6. Lyly and Hooker – The Translators, Pamphleteers and Critics

Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature1. Shakespeare2. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries in Drama3. The Schools of Jacobean Poetry4. Jacobean Prose – Secular5. The Golden Age of English Pulpit - I

Saintsbury, cont.

Caroline Literature

1. Blank Verse and the New Couplet

2. The Metaphysicals – The Lyric Poets – The Miscellansts, etc.

3. The Drama till the Closing of the THeatres

4. The Golden Age of the English Pulpit – II

5. Miscellanous Prose

6. Scots Poetry and Prose

The Augustan Ages

1. The Age of Dryden – Poetry

2. The Age of Dryden – Drama

3. The Age of Dryden - Prose

Saintsbury, cont.

4. Queen Anne Prose (Swift, Steele, Addison, etc.)5. Pope and His Elder Contemporaries in Verse

Middle and Later Eighteenth-Century Literature1. The Poets from Thomson to Crabbe2. The Eighteenth-Century Novel3. Johnson, Goldsmith, and the Later Essayists4. The Graver Prose5. Eighteenth-Century Drama6. Miscellaneous Writers

The Triumph of Romance1. The Poets from Coleridge to Keats

Saintsbury, cont.

2. The Novel – Scott and Miss Austen

3. The New Essay (Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc.)

4. The Last Georgian Prose

5. The Minor Poets of 1800-1830

Victorian Literature

1. Tennyson and Browning

2. The Victorian Novel (Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, etc.)

3. History and Criticism (Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, etc.)

4. Poetry since the Middle of the Century

5. Miscellaneous (J. S. Mill, Darwin, etc.)

Baugh, Albert C.: A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948

Book I. The Middle Ages

1. The old English Period (to 1100)

2. The Middle English Period (1100-1500)

Book II. The Renaissance

1. The Early Tudors (1485-1558)

2. The Reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603)

3. The Early Stuarts and The Commonwealth (1603-1660)

Book III. The Restauration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1789)

1. The Rise of Classicism

2. Classicism and Journalism

3. The Disintegration of Classicism

Book IV. The Nineteenth Century and After

Dodsworth, Martin, ed.: The Penguin History of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1970) 1994

1. The Middle Ages

2. English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674

3. English Drama to 1710

4. Dryden to Johnson

5. The Romantic Period

6. The Victorians

7. The Twentieth Century

[8. American Literature to 1900

9. American Literature since 1900]

Ford, Boris, ed.: The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1983) 1990

1. Medieval LiteraturePart One: Chaucer and the Alliterative TraditionPart Two: The European Inheritance

2. The Age of Shakespeare3. From Donne to Marvell4. From Dryden to Johnson5. From Blake to Byron6. From Dickens to Hardy7. From James to Eliot8. The Present[9. American Literature]

Penguin Pelican

Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature. 4 vols. London: Secker and Warburg, (1960) 1969

1. From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century2. Shakespeare to Milton

[ShakespeareDrama from Jonson to the Closing of the TheatresMiltonProse in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth CenturiesScottish Literature to 1700]

3. The Restoration to 18004. The Romantics to the Present Day

+ The Present Age in British Literature(Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, (1958) 1969

David Daiches

Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976

1. Poetry around the Turn of the Century

2. Poetry in Rapport with a Public

3. Popular Modernism

[The New Poetry of America

Imagism

Poetry for Democracy

Conservative and Regional Poets of America

Black Poets of America: The First Phase

British Poetry after the War, 1918-1928]

4. The Beginnings of the High Modernist Mode

Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. Modernism and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987

1. The Age of High Modernism

[The Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot, 1925-1950

Eliot’s Later Career

Modes of Modern Style in the United States

Hart Crane

The Poetry of Critical Intelligence

The Period Style of the 1930s in England

W. H. Auden

The English Romantic Revival]

1. The Resurgence of Pound, Williams, and Stevens

2. Postmodernism

Period Studies

Innes, Christopher: Modern British Drama 1890-1990.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992

Proceeds by a mixture of chronological, generic, cultural and theoretical features

Bradbury, Malcolm: The Modern British Novel 1878

2001. London: Penguin Books, 2001

Proceeds by chronology, each decade a characteristic quality is attributed to

Period Studies

Childs, Peter: The TwentiethCentury in Poetry. A CriticalSurvey. London and New York:Routledge, 1999

Proceeds by a mixture ofchronological, generic, culturaland theoretical features.

Period Studies

Bradbury, Malcolm; McFarlane, James, eds.:Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930.London: Penguin Books (1976) 1991

1. The Name and nature of Modernism2. The Cultural and Intellectual Climate of Modernism3. A Geography of Modernism4. Literary Movements5. The Lyric Poetry of Modernism6. The Modernist Novel7. Modernist Drama

Histories of Genres

Allen, Walter: The English Novel. Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books (1954) 1958

Grierson, Herbert J. C.; Smith, J. C.: A Critical History

of English Poetry. New Jersey: Humanities Press,

London: Athlone Press (1944) 1983

Cultural Memory

How we create an image of the past, How we make sense of our past from our present,How we understand ourselves and our past,What stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves,What we choose to remember or forget,How we explain the reasons why we remember or

forget something,How we make sure that we hand over the memories

that matter to us

Cultural Memory as a Concept

• Introduced to the archaeological disciplines by Jan Assmann

Assman’s definition: the "outer dimension of humanmemory"

• "memory culture“ (Erinnerungskultur)• "reference to the past“ (Vergangenheitsbezug)

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.0.html


Cultural MemorySee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory

As a term, cultural memory was first introduced by theGerman Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book Daskulturelle Gedächtnis (1992). Assmann and fellowscholars have identified a general interest in memoryand mnemonics since the early 1980s, illustrated byphenomena as diverse as memorials and retro-culture.

Some might see cultural memory as becoming moredemocratic, due to liberalization and the rise of newmedia. Others see cultural memory as remainingconcentrated in the hands of corporations and states.

Cultural MemorySee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory

Because memory is not just an individual, privateexperience but is also part of the collective domain,cultural memory has become a topic in bothhistoriography and cultural studies.

These emphasize cultural memory’s process(historiography) and its implications and objects(cultural studies), respectively.

Memory is a phenomenon that is directly related to thepresent; our perception of the past is alwaysinfluenced by the present, which means that it isalways changing.

Cultural MemoryHistoriographical approach

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory

Crucial in understanding cultural memory as aphenomenon is the distinction between memory andhistory. This distinction was put forward by PierreNora, who pinpointed a niche in-between history andmemory. Simply put, memories are the events thatactually happened, while histories are subjectiverepresentations of what historians believe is crucial toremember. This dichotomy, it should be noted,emerged at a particular moment in history: it impliesthat there used to be a time when memories could existas such — without being representational.



Scholars disagree as to when to locate the momentrepresentation 'took over'. Nora points to the formationof European nation states. For Richard Terdiman, theFrench revolution is the breaking point: the change ofa political system, together with the emergence ofindustrialization and urbanization, made life morecomplex than ever before. This not only resulted in anincreasing difficulty for people to understand the newsociety in which they were living, but also, as thisbreak was so radical, people had trouble relating to thepast before the revolution. In this situation, people nolonger had an implicit understanding of their past.



In order to understand the past, it had to berepresented through history. As people realized thathistory was only one version of the past, they becamemore and more concerned with their own culturalheritage (in French called patrimoine) which helpedthem shape a collective and national identity.



In search for an identity to bind a country or peopletogether, governments have constructed collectivememories in the form of commemorations whichshould bring and keep together minority groups andindividuals with conflicting agendas.

The obsession with memory coincides with the fear offorgetting and the aim for authenticity.



However, more recently questions have arisen whether

there ever was a time in which 'pure', non-

representational memory existed. Representation is a

crucial precondition for human perception in general:

pure, organic and objective memories can never be

witnessed as such.

Cultural Memory

In an oral tradition, all cultural representations are

easily remembered ones; hard-to-remember

representations are forgotten, or transformed into

more easily remembered ones, before reaching a

cultural level of distribution.

Sperber, Dan: Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic

Approach. Malden, MSA: Blackwell, 1996, 74

Cultural MemoryCultural Studies approach


Recently, interest has developed in the area of'embodied memory'. The body can be seen as acontainer, or carrier of memory.

Memory can be contained in objects. Souvenirs andphotographs inhabit an important place in the cultural memory discourse.

Cultural MemoryCultural Studies approach


Another practice that has a specific relationship withmemory is photography. The act of taking a picture canunderline the importance of remembering, bothindividually and collectively.

Pictures cannot only stimulate or help memory, but can

rather eclipse the actual memory – when we rememberin terms of the photograph – or they can serve as areminder of our propensity to forget.

Cultural MemoryBetween Culture and Memory: Experience


The rise of gender and postcolonial studiesunderscored the importance of the individual andparticular memories of those unheard in mostcollective accounts: women, minorities, homosexuals,etc.

Experience, whether it be lived or imagined, relatesmutually to culture and memory. It is influenced byboth factors, but determines these at the same time.

Cultural MemoryBetween Culture and Memory: Experience


Culture influences experience by offering mediatedperceptions that affect it. In turn, experience affectsculture, since individual experience becomescommunicable and therefore collective.

A memorial, for example, can represent a shared senseof loss.

Experience is substantial to the interpretation ofculture as well as memory, and vice versa.

DublinGeneral Post Office

The Death of Cuchulain(1911) by Oliver Sheppard

Cultural Memory

Assmann, Jan: Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992

Nora, Pierre: 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire'. Representations, 26, 1989, 7–25.

“Memory Culture”

The way a society ensures cultural continuity

by preserving, with the help of cultural mnemonics, its

collective knowledge from one generation to the next,

rendering it possible for later generations to

reconstruct their cultural identity.



“Reference to the Past”

• Reassure the members of a society of their collective identity and supply them with an awareness of their unity and singularity in time and space—i.e., an historical consciousness—by creating a shared past

• It can involve rituals and ceremonies at special occasions such as commemoration days, and at special places such as ancient monuments, which function as timemarks and sites of memory


Forms of Cultural Memory

Formal – institutional – private – personal • History• Schools, subjects, syllabi, exams• Religion• Holidays (public, national, religious, private rituals)• Anecdotes• Memories• Controversial, minority views, counter-narratives

Cultural Memory and Literature

Literary works – popular, canonicalHistory of literature

- of a language- of a nation

Representation of a literature or culture in anotherliterature or culture:

stereotypespopular imageshistory of their literature

Cultural memory at DES, SEAS

British Literature in the Hungarian Cultural Memoryproject at the Department of English Studies, dir. Prof. Ágnes Péter

Cultural Memory and LiteratureAn international conference (24–25 Sept, 2010)

http://kulturalisemlekezet.blogspot.com/

http://kulturalisemlekezet.blogspot.com/

Cultural memory resources

Cultural Memory, Collective Memory sites

Brief introduction to names and concepts:

http://www.collectivememory.net/2009/12/cultural-memory-and-communicative.html

Up to date academic info on projects and conferences:

http://www.collectivememory.net/

Definition with interpretation and sources before 2000:




Cultural Memory Texts

Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”

Collective Memory and Cultural Identity - JStor

www.jstor.org/stable/488538

Recent publications:Cultural Memory Studies: An International and

Interdisciplinary Handbook. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nunning eds. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Stanford UP

http://www.sup.org/browse.cgi?x=series&y=Cultural%20Memory%20in%20the%20Present

http://www.jstor.org/stable/488538




Studying Cultural Memory

Center for the Study of Cultural Memory at the University of London

http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-cultural-memoryUniversity of Brighton

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/postgrad/cultural-history-memory-identity-ma

The Centre for Bible and Cultural Memory, Faculty of Theology, Copenhagen:

http://www.teol.ku.dk/english/dept/bicum/

http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-cultural-memory



http://www.teol.ku.dk/english/dept/bicum/

Literatures in English

Postcolonial Studies

• explores the various facets—textual, figural, spatial, historical, political and economic—of the colonial encounter, and the ways in which this encounter shaped the West and non-West alike

• investigations from many disciplines, as well as a theoretical perspective from which to view a variety of concerns

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13688790.asp

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13688790.asp

Literatures in English

English literary texts representing other cultures – the living conscience and public depository of thecultural memories of the world,

telling the story, incorporating the way of thinking,and mirroring the language of other cultures.

Some examples

V. S. Naipaul: A Bend in the River (1979), narrated by an Indian Muslim in an unnamed African country after independence, observing the rapid changes in his homeland with an outsider's distance.

Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1981), key events in the history of India.

Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living in England.

Tibor Fischer: Under the Frog (1992), the 1950s and 1956 in Hungary.

Some more examples

R. K. Narayan: The Guide (1958), a novel based in

Malgudi, the fictional town in South India. The novel

describes the transformation of the protagonist, Raju

from a tour guide to a spiritual guide and become one of the greatest holy man of India.

Derek Walcott: Omeros (1990), an epic poem set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, drawing on Homer, Virgil, and Dante, presenting themes such as colonialism, historiography, homecoming, paternity.

Derek Walcott(1930)

Salman Rushdie(1947)

Kazuo Ishiguro(1954)

Postcolonial StudiesSee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism

Post-colonialism (postcolonial theory, post-colonial theory) is an intellectual discourse that consists ofreactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy ofcolonialis.

Postcolonialism comprises a set of theories foundamongst anthropology, architecture, philosophy,film, political science, human geography, sociology,feminism, religious and theological studies, andliterature.


The ultimate goal of post-colonialism is accounting forand combating the residual effects of colonialism oncultures.

It is not simply concerned with salvaging pastworlds, but learning how the world can move beyondthis period together, towards a place of mutual respect.


Post-colonialist theorists recognize that many of theassumptions which underlie the "logic" of colonialismare still active forces today.

Exposing and deconstructing the racist, imperialistnature of these assumptions will remove their power ofpersuasion and coercion.


A key goal of post-colonial theorists is clearingspace for multiple voices. This is especially true ofthose voices that have been previously silenced bydominant ideologies – subalterns.

Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, provides a clearpicture of the ways social scientists, specificallyOrientalists, can disregard the views of those theyactually study – preferring instead to rely on theintellectual superiority of themselves and their peers.


Postcolonialism as a literary theory (with a critical

approach), deals with literature produced in countries

that once were colonies of other countries.

Colonized people, especially of the British Empire,

attended British universities and with their access to

education, created this new criticism. Following the

breakup of the Soviet Union during the late 20th

century, its former republics became the subject of this

study as well.


Postcolonial theory provides a framework thatdestabilizes dominant discourses in the West,challenges inherent assumptions, and critiquesthe legacies of colonialism.


Postcolonialism deals with cultural identity incolonized societies: the dilemmas of developing anational identity after colonial rule;

• the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate that identity;• the ways in which the knowledge of the colonized (subordinated) people has been generated and used to serve the colonizer's interests;• the ways in which the colonizer's literature has justified colonialism via images of the colonised as a perpetually inferior people, society and culture.


Founding works on postcolonialism• Edward Said: Orientalism (1978)• Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern

Speak? (1988)• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: The Postcolonial Critic

(1990)• Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture (1994)• Declan Kiberd: Inventing Ireland (1995)

Charles Tennyson Turner(1808-1879)

LETTY’S GLOBE

When Letty had scarce pass'd her third glad year, And her young artless words began to flow, One day we gave the child a colour'd sphere Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know, By tint and outline, all its sea and land. She patted all the world; old empires peep'd Between her baby fingers; her soft hand Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap'd, And laugh'd and prattled in her world-wide bliss; But when we turn'd her sweet unlearned eye On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry-- 'Oh! yes, I see it, Letty's home is there!' And while she hid all England with a kiss, Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.

Charles Tennyson Turner(1808-1879)

Letty’s Globe

When Letty had scarce pass'd her third glad year, And her young artless words began to flow, One day we gave the child a colour'd sphere Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know, By tint and outline, all its sea and land. She patted all the world; old empires peep'd Between her baby fingers; her soft hand Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap'd, And laugh'd and prattled in her world-wide bliss; But when we turn'd her sweet unlearned eye On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry - 'Oh! yes, I see it, Letty's home is there!' And while she hid all England with a kiss, Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.

Victorian Terrestrial Globes

Victorian Terrestrial Globe

Map of the British Empire, 1886

Map of the British Empire, 1922

RUDYARD KIPLING(1865-1936)

George Orwell called Kipling a "prophet of British imperialism".

He had the reputation as the ‘Poet of the Empire’.

The poem concerns the signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912.

The Ulster Covenant was signed by just under half a million men and women from Ulster, on and before 28 September 1912, in protest against the Third Home Rule Bill, introduced by the British Government in that same year. The signatories were all against the establishment of a Home Rule parliament in Dublin.

ULSTER1912

The dark eleventh hour

Draws on and sees us sold

To every evil power

We fought against of old.

Rebellion, rapine hate

Oppression, wrong and greed

Are loosed to rule our fate,

By England's act and deed.

The blood our fathers spilt,

Our love, our toils, our pains,

Are counted us for guilt,

And only bind our chains.

Before an Empire's eyes

The traitor claims his price.

What need of further lies?

We are the sacrifice.

ULSTER1912

We asked no more than leave

To reap where we had sown,

Through good and ill to cleave

To our own flag and throne.

Now England's shot and steel

Beneath that flag must show

How loyal hearts should kneel

To England's oldest foe.

Ulster1912

The residents of Ulster, the northernmost province of Ireland, desired to keep their province part of the United Kingdom. By the late 19th century "Home Rule" was the idea de rigueur – it would give the Irish a devolved Parliament in Dublin to devise legislation for their own affairs, but they would be part of the British Empire. There were critics of this plan who felt that Home Rule was too close to an independent Ireland. Furthermore, as mostly Protestant, they feared the dominance of the rural, catholic South of Ireland over the northern part.

Thomas Osborne Davis(1814–1845)

was a revolutionary Irish writer who was the chief organiser and poet of the Young Ireland movement.

A NATION ONCE AGAIN

When boyhood's fire was in my bloodI read of ancient freemen,For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,Three hundred men and three men;And then I prayed I yet might seeOur fetters rent in twain,And Ireland, long a province, be.A Nation once again!

A Nation once again,A Nation once again,And lreland, long a province, beA Nation once again!

Literature in Context. Lecture 10 Period Study Literary History Cultural Memory Postcolonial Studies...

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