Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939

The Anglo-Irish literary renaissance that flowered between Edmund Burke's last years and the generation of Yeats and Joyce had close ties to European Romanticism and was a critical force in the development of modernist literature in the origins of Protestant Ascendancy ideology in the alarm of the 1790's, McCormack traces its cultural significance through an examination of a number of central texts and concepts. Beginning with Burke's correspondence and Reflections , McCormack goes on to discuss Maria Edgeworth's fiction, the political vocabulary of T.D. Gregg and E.W. Gladstone, Celticism, the drama and poetry of Teats, and Joyce's oeuvre as a whole. A wider European context is provided by reference to Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, and an excursion through a critical period in Irish cultural history asking why it was that the late 19th century should have been a time of such prolific literary achievements and examining the part played by the Protestant Ascendancy on the one hand, and the force of tradition on the other.