Introduction

The conventional view of the Revival as thematically rural and anti-modern obscures the role of the city in the formation of a revivalist literary aesthetic, and the extent to which conceptions of urbanity were central to the creation of Irish cultural identity before independence. Examining the infiltration of new notions of urbanism into Irish culture in this era, in particular through the Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland, this talk looks at the Dublin-based writings of James Stephens to show how revivalist writers were responsive to the peculiarities of Irish urban experience. Focusing primarily on The Charwoman's Daughter and The Insurrection in Dublin, this talk rethinks the relationship between a revivalist aesthetic and the representation of the city both as a physical entity and as an ideological concept.

The material in this podcast has been reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan from Liam Lanigan, James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future, 2014, Palgrave Macmillan.

Liam Lanigan

Liam Lanigan is Assistant Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and former Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork. He has previously taught at NUI Maynooth, the University of Kaposvar, Hungary, and University College Dublin, where he received his doctorate in 2011. In 2014 he was Short-Term Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future (London: Palgrave, 2014).