Risings: The Irish Literary Revival and the Making of a Nation
Risings: The Irish Literary Revival and the Making of a Nation
April 29 – July 25, 2026
By the turn of the twentieth century, the people of Ireland had already endured centuries of struggle for political independence and national identity. The American and French Revolutions had sparked national movements across Europe and elsewhere, but in the case of Ireland, the Irish rebellions of 1798 and 1848 against Britain both failed. Famine and exodus in the 1840s and ’50s eventually halved the population of the country, and, in the words of Gavin Duffy at the time, “paralyzed many forces in Ireland, and none more disastrously than our growing literature.” Charles Stewart Parnell’s push for Home Rule in 1889 slipped away owing to the fallout from his adultery scandal. Yet while outright freedom from Britain seemed impossible to achieve, a cultural movement known as the Irish Literary Revival came to serve as a crucial impetus for Ireland’s reemergent sense of self, while establishing Ireland as a world-wide literary force.
W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory were among the founders of the movement that helped restore the native traditions of Ireland. By searching out the folklore, legend, music, and poetry of an ancient language and culture, often in collaboration, they re-animated the traditional stories that became the cornerstone of the Literary Revival. Both Dublin and Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s home in the west of the country, became central meeting grounds for the group of writers who created the novels, plays, and poems that galvanized the world. In short order, Yeats and Lady Gregory founded and directed a national theater that brought to the stage Irish plays with Irish actors, the first modern repertory company in the English-speaking world. And, together with other Irish writers, poets, and playwrights including J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey, they succeeded in writing, in Lady Gregory’s phrase, “the book of the people.”
As the cultural identity of the country flourished, so did the push for political freedom, resulting in a burst of bloodshed in Dublin known as the 1916 Easter Rising. Britain’s summary executions of the rebel leaders drew international condemnation and energized a desire for independence even among the most moderate Irish residents. Six years after the 1916 Rising, following a violent struggle, Ireland achieved its independence. As for the Irish Literary Revival, it influenced movements around the world and spawned a further generation of Irish writers, from James Joyce and Flann O’Brien to Edna O’Brien and Seamus Heaney.
