Irish Orientalism : a literary and intellectual history
"British writers from Cambrensis to Spenser depicted Ireland as a remote borderland inhabited by wild descendants of Asian Scythians - barbarians to the ancient Greeks. Contemporaneous Irish writers likewise borrowed classical traditions, imagining the Orient as an ancient homeland. Lennon traces the influence of Irish Orientalism through origin legends, philology, antiquarianism, and historiography into Irish literature and culture, exploring the works of Keating, O'Flaherty, Swift, Vallancey, Sheridan, Moore, Croker, Owenson, Mangan, de Vere, and others. He explores a key moment of Irish Orientalism - the twentieth-century, Celtic Revival - discussing the works of Gregory, Casement, Connolly, and Joyce, but focusing on Theosophist writers W.B
Print Book, English, 2004
Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, N.Y., 2004
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xxxi, 478 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
9780815630449, 0815630441
54768157
pt. 1. Continuity and development
Origin legends and pseudohistories
Ogygia: Europe's backyard orient and the rise of antiquarianism
Allegory and critique: Irish orientialism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature
Empire, Ireland, and India
pt. 2. The orientall and the Celt: the syncretism of the revival
Uniting the circumference: cross-colonialism
W.B. Yeats's Celtic orient
Theosophy and the nation: George Russell (AE) and James Stephens
James, Seuman, and Jayaram Cousins
Conclusion: was Fu Manchu Celtic? and other scrutable speculations