Dialogues of Despair: Nationalist Cultural Discourse and the Revival in the North of Ireland, 1900-20‪.‬

When compared to the monumental cultural achievements of the movement in the South, the Northern Revival has occupied an uncertain place in twentieth-century Irish literary history. If the Revival proper takes its place within a narrative of independence, its role having been to provide canonical texts upon which assertions of national cultural autonomy could be guaranteed, the Northern Revival, in contrast, found itself hopelessly compromised by the very different narrative of Partition; an event which ran counter to all its activity and one to which it seemingly had no answer. Such considerations suggest the reasons why the Northern Revival has rarely been understood as an integral part of the Revival movement as a whole, while they also indicate that even the term 'Northern Revival' itself has become a fraught and problematic concept. When we look for coherency in its objectives, we find fragmentation and discord; when we search for its cultural achievements, we find sporadic and often inconclusive activit y that ultimately collapses into post-Partition despair. To reconstitute the Northern Revival, then, is by no means a straightforward task for if it is viewed in the light of subsequent events, its fleeting coherency, its sense of itself as a movement, dissolves. It was, in these terms, always fragile in its existence and uncertain in its aims. This has not been helped by the fact that many accounts of nationalism and culture in Ireland have neglected the North (or, at least, neglected its pre-1969 configuration), or, perhaps more damagingly again, have elided the discontinuities and fractures that existed between Southern and Northern cultural nationalist forms. At the same time, while there are now useful and important studies of such organisations as the Ulster Literary Theatre, the Gaelic League in the North, and the numerous periodicals and magazines that emerged in this period, such activities have to be seen, not disparately, but in the totality of their collective effects as a series of interconnectin g forces. If such a practice provides a means of more fully understanding the dynamics of cultural 'Northernness', it may also enable the history of the Revival project as a whole to be rewritten. It is because of these difficulties that the legacy of the Northern Revival can appear obscure. If, as I have suggested, a continuity (no matter how fraught) can be traced between the activities of the Revival in the South and the subsequent manifestation of the independent State, it is less easy to recognize the work of the predominantly Belfast-based Northern Revival in the cultural and political life of Northern Ireland. In fact the dissolution of the movement in the North was so sudden and overwhelming that its aspirations can often only be recognized in subsequent Northern Irish culture as a fleeting, and often embittered, presence. Consider, for instance, the following descriptions of street life in Belfast: