The beginnings of the Irish Literary Revival are usually linked to the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891 and a vacuum in political nationalism. The movement identified itself as such as of 1894, following W.P. Ryan’s programmatic essay collection The Irish literary revival: Its history, pioneers and possibilities. It was in equal measure triggered by the coming of age of a new, post-Victorian generation of Anglo-Irish writers and intellectuals, inspired by the likes of Ibsen, Walter Pater and the pre-Raphaelites. Some of this generation were close to naturalism (George Moore, George Bernard Shaw), others to the symbolist aesthetics of the fin de siècle (W.B. Yeats). While Yeats made a name for himself in England as an aestheticist poet and critic, he set up a literary association in Ireland to promote the type of symbolist writing and art theatre he had seen and admired in Paris. He presented this cosmopolitan orientation as a drive to lift Irish letters from provincial drabness, and in addition argued that infusing these new aesthetics with the country’s native, Celtic cultural traditions would ensure both artistic originality and national prestige. The past was mined for ancient myths and hero-tales, the present for peasant superstition and authentic folkways bespeaking a Celtic spirituality.

All this gave rise to publications in the field of folklore. From Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy legends and traditions of the South of Ireland (1825-28) to Jeremiah Curtin’s Myths and folklore of Ireland (1890), the riches of Irish oral literature had attracted the attention of fieldworkers in a tradition which, moving from anecdotal anthologies to academic ethnographical interest, would eventually lead to the setting up of an Irish Folklore Commission in the independent Free State (1935). The importance of folklore as a national imaginaire for the literary articulation of an Irish identity took place in the Revival climate, and was manifested by publications such as Douglas Hyde’s Beside the fire, 1890; Yeats’s The Celtic twilight, 1893; Lady Gregory’s Visions and beliefs in Ireland, 1920.

At the same time the backward look at the nation’s roots (in peasant culture or in ancient myth and hero-tale) informed a future-oriented, reformist or indeed revivalist agenda. More even than in its plays and verse, the Literary Revival expressed itself in literary or cultural criticism and spirited controversies – like that of John Eglinton (Literary ideals in Ireland, 1899), Hyde (The necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland, 1892; The story of early Gaelic literature, 1897; A literary history of Ireland, 1899) and, again, Yeats (Ideas of good and evil, 1903). The literary querelle between the symbolist Yeats and the naturalist Moore, and the theatrical scandals surrounding the plays of Synge, intensified the publicity and public-opinion-provoking function of these literary altercations over the decades.

A variety of drama associations were set up by the end of the 1890s to put these ideas into theatrical practice. The theatre gathered language revivalists and aesthetes, Catholic Ultramontanists, theosophists and socialists, separatist nationalists and upper-class conservatives, Ibsenites and symbolists. The plays that were staged were called “national” for many different, often conflicting reasons: for giving an inspirational and uplifting view of the country’s peasantry, using the Gaelic language, emulated international avant-garde theatre, or evoking the ancient myths of the Celts. After an initial honeymoon period in 1902, marked by Yeats’s most propagandistically nationalistic play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the coalition of nationalists and theatrical avant-gardists broke apart. What had emerged, meanwhile, was a sense that an intense theatrical scene had sprung to life in Dublin, that it was capable of rousing emotions and controversies, and of galvanizing public opinion over issues of nationality and literature. Meanwhile, important new plays were being produced (by Yeats and his controversial protégé J.M. Synge), and a new generation (among whom was the young Ibsenite James Joyce) was being inspired.

In 1904, Yeats’s drama company moved into a dedicated theatre building on Dublin’s Abbey Street. The Abbey Theatre from that moment developed into Ireland’s premier theatre, a status it still holds. Controversies marked the premieres of plays by Synge and Seán O’Casey, and although Yeats lost some interest in the venture, which he felt fell short of his ideal of high aestheticism for small connoisseur audiences, it did remain the focus of literary life in Ireland – partly also because more recalcitrant geniuses (like Joyce, O’Casey and Samuel Beckett) left the country in pursuit of their literary goals.