The Celtic Revival and Arnold : Yahoo and Eiren

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Other Title
  • ケルト文化復興とアーノルド : ヤフーとアイリーン
  • ケルト ブンカ フッコウ ト アーノルド ヤフー ト アイリーン

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At the fin de siecle, the Celtic Revival was complex and multifaced movement, comprising a variety of approaches to the representation of Irish identity. In this paper, the influence of Matthew Arnold on the Celtic Revival will be mainly explored. He created a stereotyped image of the Celt as a “shy, sensitive and imaginative” race. The Irish people have greatly changed their image from what they used to be in the eighteenth century. The image of Irishman in England can be traced back to the age of Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift. Yahoo represents the savage people whom Jonathan Swift described in Gulliver's Travels (1726). The description of the Irishman as Yahoo was found in the cartoons and writings of the eighteenth century. Eiren, on the other hand, was a gloomy and beautiful woman, with long and dark hair. She was often drawn in the cartoons of the magazines at 1890s. The inclination for nostalgic representations of the Celt could be found in the figure of Eiren. In the first section, the discovery of the Celtic motif will be discussed in connection with the rise of Irish nationalism in the middle of the eighteenth century. The traditional Irish symbols such as the Celtic Cross, harp, and Irish wolfhound, will be referred in the poems and paintings. In the second section, I will deal with the image of the Irishman as Yahoo, in Gulliver's Travels and the cartoons of Punch. In the last section, the Celtic Revival and the transformation of the Irish image at the end of century will be discussed. The figure of Erin suggested Irish femininity itself. This figure of Erin cannot be separable from Arnold's opinion. As a critic points out, the Celt is a construct based on oppositions such as wild and tame, savage and civilized, or idealist and utilitarian. In this paper, an ambivalence in English attitude towards the Celt will be also explored.

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Journal

  • ENGLISH REVIEW

    ENGLISH REVIEW (17), 3-28, 2002-12-20

    堺 : 桃山学院大学総合研究所

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