William Butler Yeats and Irish Folklore : Reconstructing Celtic Ireland (Special Issue Dedicated to Professor NAKAMURA, Shoko)

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Other Title
  • W.B.イェイツとフォークロア : ケルティク・アイルランドの構築 (中村祥子教授退任記念号)
  • W.B.イェイツとフォークロア--ケルティク・アイルランドの構築
  • W B イェイツ ト フォークロア ケルティク アイルランド ノ コウチク

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One of the chief concerns of this paper is to reexamine the attitude of AngloIrish Revisionists like Yeats towards Irish folklore. The ambiguous word “Celtic” came to be used in England rather than in Ireland and Germany. Arnold is important in that he introduced the “Celtic” idea as a differentiating fact between Ireland and England. Yeats’s Celtic Twilight comes out of his own collection of folklore, while Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland anthologized material from written sources. Yeats’s social status as an Anglo-Irishman was ambivalent in colonial Ireland. As Seamus Deane points out “the omanticizing of the Celt becomes, in effect, the romanticizing of the Irish Catholic,” Yeats could find a sense of belonging to Ireland by inventing his fictional Ireland. In this respect, the word “Celtic” is significant to him. In the first section, the Irish fairy motif in the Celtic Revival will be discussed. While the fairy theme was a convention in literature and paintings of the Victorian Age, the fairy belief was a living folk tradition in Ireland. In the second section, the fairy motif will be discussed from the psychological point of view. In particular, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, the painting of Richard Dadd, will be explored in connection with Irish fairies. In the last section, the “changeling” motif will be explored in the poems of Yeats and his contemporaries. “Changeling” is dealt with in “Stolen Child”, “Host of the Air”, and his writings on Irish folklore. By collecting or anthologizing Irish folklore, Yeats could find his sense of identity in Catholic Ireland, which had tried to achieve her independence from Britain. In brief, both Anglo-Irish Revisionists and Catholic peasants could find common goal in Celtic Ireland.

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KJ00002373448

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Journal

  • ENGLISH REVIEW

    ENGLISH REVIEW (19), 167-189, 2005-02-10

    堺 : 桃山学院大学総合研究所

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