Revival movements aim to revitalize traditions perceived as threatened or moribund by adapting them to new temporal, spatial, and social contexts. While many of these. Welcome to the companion website for The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival, edited by Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill. Garmin Vus010r G2 Vision Card more. Please use the link so the left to read more.

Book Title: Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891-1922 ISBN-13: 9002 Author: Edited by Declan Kiberd and P.J. Mathews Publisher: Abbey Theatre Press Guideline Price: €18.90 What, or whom, do Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic have in common? The answer is God.

The covenant “humbly relies on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted”. The proclamation “places the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms”.

Covenant and proclamation are among the “writings” that this rich, if idiosyncratic, anthology invites us to mix and match. Declan Kiberd and PJ Mathews draw on manifestos, memoirs, cultural and political essays, fiction, drama, poetry, song. Their object is to bring alive the “extraordinary generation of dynamic people” who “shaped the country”. Like all anthologies, Handbook of the Irish Revival has its own shaping agenda. It is divided into sections, such as “Theatre Matters”, “Social Conditions” and “Women and Citizenship”, and the breezy introductions are not opinion-free: the Famine “was widely understood by the ruling classes as a stroke of divine providence to punish a degenerate people”. But Kiberd and Mathews hardly claim to stand outside the (continuing) “cultural and political debate” to which their anthology bears witness. They know that “different versions of the Revival have been produced at different historical moments”.

And they believe that the present moment – “a time of national introspection during the Decade of Commemorations” – needs a new version. Thus they diverge from “prominent thinkers” for whom “the entire Revivalist project was bogus and fraudulent”.

They equally reject an “exclusive focus on the literary revival”, which has “cut off the artistic energies of the period from the political forces that informed them, thereby transmogrifying the movement into an elitist one of high cultural exchange between a privileged few”. This holistic approach is broadly welcome. For instance, it brings WB Yeats out of the cold in which he has often languished during Irish culture wars. Yet, when introspection becomes “national”, it’s possible to be overinclusive, to overextend editorial terms and categories. Take “revival”, which here covers every form of Irish artistic, intellectual and political endeavour before 1916.

Back in the day, “movement(s)” more than “revival” seems the term of choice, although there’s a notable extract from John Eglinton’s 1904 essay On the Possibility of a Thought Revival in Ireland.