Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism : Yeats, Joyce, MacDiarmid and Jones

Traces multivocal receptions of classics across political and linguistic nationalisms of twentieth-century Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and shows how they provoked experimental literary forms of modernist collusion and resistance - aesthetic idioms whose use of antiquity interrogated the aims of Celtic ''nation-building'' in the British Isles. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Celtic modernism had a complex history with classical reception. In this book, Gregory Baker examines the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to show how new forms of modernist literary expression emerged as the evolution of classical education, the insurgent power of cultural nationalisms and the desire for transformative modes of artistic invention converged across Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Writers on the ''Celtic fringe'' sometimes confronted, and sometimes consciously advanced, crudely ideological manipulations of the inherited past. But even as they did so, their eccentric ways of using the classics and its residual cultural authority animated new decentered idioms of English - literary vernaculars so fragmented and inflected by polyglot intrusion that they expanded the range of Anglophone literature and left in their wake compelling stories for a new age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.