BOOK REVIEW: DECLAN KIBERD AND P. J. MATTHEWS (EDS.), HANDBOOK OF THE IRISH REVIVAL. “AN ANTHOLOGY OF IRISH CULTURAL AND POLITICAL WRITINGS 1891-1922”, DUBLIN: ABBEY THEATRE PRESS, 2015, 505 P.

Abstract

Published as an inaugural volume by Abbey Theatre Press in 2015, Handbook of the Irish Literary Revival offers a comprehensive anthology of seminal texts produced in one of the most prolific and meaningful periods in Ireland’s history: the Irish Revival. This period spanned three decades, from the late nineteenth century to the early 1920s (1891 marking the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish National Movement, and 1922 signalling the establishment of the Irish Free State), when a generation of artists and thinkers returned to Ireland’s past in an effort to project a future for their nation amidst the other European countries. Sparked by questions about the availability of these essential documents, raised during The Theatre of Memory Symposium held in 2014, the collection of manifestos, poems, pamphlets, newspapers articles, commentaries, letters and fictional extracts that capture the ethos of those decades is co-edited by Declan Kiberd, Professor of Modern Irish and English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, author of groundbreaking studies such as Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995) and, most recently, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (2018), and P. J. Matthews, Associate Professor at University College Dublin, editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Millington Synge (2009).