Abstract
The Irish literary revival’s pastoral vision of a people untainted by urban modernity, though largely inspired by German Romanticism and the proliferation of scholarly investigations of the folklore of various European ‘national literatures’, has frequently been linked with the experience of the Famine1 and the revolution in land ownership brought about by the Land Acts of the late nineteenth century.2 The latter, in particular, threatened the position of the Protestant Ascendancy within Irish society, who faced the possibility of total marginalization in the face of a growing, and increasingly vocal Catholic middle class. Viewed as a garrison population, Protestant writers began to hark back to a largely imaginary, prelapsarian Irish idyll defined by rurality and premodern social harmony.3
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© 2014 Liam Lanigan
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Lanigan, L. (2014). ‘A Space-embracing Somewhere, Beyond Surmise, Beyond Geography’: Visions of the City in the Irish Revival. In: James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378200_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378200_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47822-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37820-0
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