Chapter 7 - Solastalgic Modernism and the West in Irish Literature, 1900–1950

Summary

In this chapter Katherine O’Callaghan highlights the crucial fact that, for many Irish writers of the Irish Revival, the West was a rhetorical construction through-and-through; most of them never had the opportunity to travel there: “For most Irish artists in the first half of the twentieth century, the West of Ireland was a place encountered not through personal visits or deep study, but through the paintings, sketches, and accounts of others.” Her essay begins by noting that “While access to the West had been improved by the extension of the railway – the Achill Sound train station had opened in 1895 – travel to and around the West was still challenging” for most. Annette Hemphill’s little-known diary, written in 1906 but published only in 1991 as Rambles of Four in Western Mayo, sets a poignant ethnographic tone in this essay that stretches from John Millington Synge and James Joyce to Daryll Figgis’s Children of the Earth, published in 1918, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, published in 1949.