ABSTRACT
“Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime” charts the literary and cultural development of two intersecting modes, primitivism and the enduring sublime rapture that it often provokes, in the emerging twentieth-century Irish nation. This book reveals an overlooked aspect of modern Irish literature as central to Ireland's artistic production and the wider global cultural production of Postcolonial literature. The “otherness” within and beyond Ireland's borders offers writers, from the Celtic Revival through independence and partition to post 9/11. The experience of the sublime is uniquely related to indigenous Irish primitivisms that twentieth-century writers have endeavored to retain as a marker of cultural distinction within the British Empire. In fact, what “Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime” makes clear is not simply an ephemeral recognition of Ireland's primitive indigenous history but a recurring rhetorical endeavor that calls forth the primitive sublime, a momentary and transcendent elation brought about by the recognition of the troubled, ritualistic and sacrificial Irish past that consistently emerges in the long twentieth century.
