Against the Despotism of Fact: Modernism, Capitalism, and the Irish Celt (SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Emerging at a moment of escalating colonial conflict between England and Ireland, the figure of the Irish Celt enjoyed a long and varied career in both English and Irish literature from the late Victorian era to World War II. While this figure assumes many forms and functions, T. J. Boynton argues that he is consistently cast as inherently resistant to capitalism. Beginning with an innovative reassessment of Matthew Arnold's The Study of Celtic Literature , from which the book also takes its title, Against the Despotism of Fact offers new readings of major works by writers such as Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. In their writing, Boynton argues, the Irish Celt served as a transnational vehicle of modernist experimentation geared toward interrogating the imperial, social, and pop-cultural dimensions of capitalist modernity. Making a significant contribution to Irish studies, modernist studies, and postcolonial studies, Against the Despotism of Fact draws attention to not only the prevalence but also the critical potential of this fraught figure. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Celticism, Capitalism, and Transnational Modernism Celticist Theory Celticist Modernisms Celticist Modernities I British Celticism 1 Matthew Arnold, the Ontology of English Capitalism, and the Rebirth of Celtic Tragedy Culture and Anarchy: Teutonic Discourse and “The Manufacture of Philistines” Culture and the Ontological Critique of Capitalism Capitalism and Celticism The (Abortive) Rebirth of Celtic Tragedy 2 The Uses of Irishness, I: British Imperial-Romantic Celticism “White Chimpanzees”: Late-Victorian Irishness Celticism and Irish Nationalism in The Hound of the Baskervilles The Celt as Colonial Agent in Kim “Schemes of Reconstruction and Improvement” 3 The Uses of Irishness, II: British Modernist Celticism “A Sentimental Lie”: Irishness and Labor in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” Celticism, Pan-Aboriginality, and Transnationalism in Lawrence Modernism and the British Celticist Heritage II Irish Celticism 4 “A Nation of Imitators”: Anticapitalisms of the Irish Revival, 1885–1910 “Sitting on the Last Verge”: Revivalist Anticapitalism “Outward and Inner Things”: The Revival’s Commodity Critique Transvaluing the Damnosa Hereditas: Celticizing the Irish Economy 5 “In Front of the Cracked Looking-Glass”: Revivalist Modernism, the Irish Female Consumer, and the Colonial Spectacle The Land of Heart’s Desire and the Rebirth of Celtic Tragedy Tabloid Journalism and Irish Nationalism in The Playboy of the Western World The Charwoman’s Daughter and the “Cracked Looking-Glass” of Irish Art The Irish Female Consumer and the Colonial Spectacle 6 The Bathetic Muse: Irish Late Modernism “In capital spirits”: Counter-Revivalism in Ulysses Official Ideologies and Cultural Realities in Ireland after 1922 “If Folly Link with Elegance”: Capitalism and Tragicomedy in Late Yeats “The highest and the lowest in the same story”: At Swim-Two-Birds “Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis”: Murphy Conclusion: Post-Celticism Notes Works Cited Index