Panel: The Irish Literary Revival — Then and Now
R. F. Foster, Belinda McKeon, Fintan O'Toole, and James Pethica discuss how literature helped imagine and complicate Irish nationhood. Virtual event.
Why we picked this
Fintan O'Toole alone would be worth an hour on this subject — his work on Irish identity and the uses of literary myth is the best in the field. Having Foster and McKeon alongside him raises this to the level of a genuine argument between serious people.
The question this panel addresses is deceptively simple: how did literature help make a nation? The Irish Literary Revival — Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and the circles around them — was not merely a cultural movement. It was also an act of political imagination, conjuring an Irish identity that could be believed in strongly enough to fight for. The complications came immediately: whose Ireland was being imagined, who was excluded, and what happened when the new state failed to live up to the literary republic’s ambitions.
Four distinguished scholars and writers address these questions from different vantage points. R. F. Foster is the leading historian of modern Ireland and biographer of W. B. Yeats. Fintan O’Toole is Ireland’s most prominent public intellectual, whose writing on Irish identity, politics, and culture has shaped debate for decades. Belinda McKeon is a novelist and critic with deep roots in the tradition being discussed. James Pethica is a scholar of the Revival whose archival work has reshaped understanding of its key figures.
The panel is virtual and free. Grolier Club members register through the club website; others register via Eventbrite.