The Irish Renaissance was a movement in the late 19th and early 20th century that aimed to revive Irish and Celtic culture. It included literature, music, crafts, and art. Notable authors include Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory. The movement also established institutions such as the Abbey Theater.
The Irish Renaissance, also described as The Irish Revival, Celtic Renaissance or Celtic Revival, was a late 19th and early 20th century movement that intended to breathe new life into Irish or Celtic tradition and culture. The period began as a reaction to hundreds of years of English rule and can be traced back to the book History of Ireland: Heroic Period (19), by Standish O’Grady. Irish Renaissance authors attempted to create an independent and national type of Irish literature, looking for ideas, plots and symbolism in Celtic legend.
At the time of the Irish Renaissance, there was a strong national movement to preserve Gaelic, the traditional language of Ireland. Irish Renaissance writers, for the most part, supported this idea, but despite these political goals, they wrote their Irish histories, plays and poems in English.
While the major offerings of the Irish Renaissance were literary, there were also advances in music, crafts, clothing and art that promoted national identity. During this period, embroidery, metalwork design, jewellery, woodwork, stonework and textiles were all parts of a distinctive Celtic style which persists to the present day.
Notable authors associated with this period include poet William Butler Yeats, playwright, poet and writer JM Synge, playwright and folklorist Lady Gregory (Isabella Augusta), and painter, critic and poet AE (George W. Russell). Even James Joyce, who was not an official part of the movement, and in fact ridiculed nationalist movements, is also grouped with these authors because he wrote mainly on Irish subjects. One of the most famous literary figures of the movement was William Butler Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He was awarded the prize for writing poems that gave “expression to the spirit of an entire nation”.
In addition to Yeats’ poetry, the more famous literature that arose from the period includes JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, James Joyce’s Dubliners, and Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne.
In addition to attempting to undo the suppression of the English, the Irish Renaissance movement attempted to establish institutions to match or surpass those found in England. Consequently, this period saw the establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre, the Irish National Literary Society and the Abbey Theater which housed the Irish National Theater Society.
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