Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms

by Richard Alan Barlow

Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms explores the ways Irish and Scottish literatures have influenced each other from the 1760s onwards. Although an early form of Celticism disappeared with the demise of the Celtic Revivals of Ireland and Scotland, the 'Celtic world' and the 'Celtic temperament' remained key themes in central texts of Irish and Scottish literature well into the twentieth century. Richard Barlow examines the emergence, development, and transformation of Celticism within Irish and Scottish writing and identifies key connections between modern Irish and Scottish authors and texts.

By reading works from figures such as James Macpherson, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Augusta Gregory, W.B. Yeats, Fiona Macleod, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, and Seamus Heaney in their political and cultural contexts, Barlow provides a new account of the characteristics and phases of literary Celticism within Romanticism, Modernism, and beyond.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 2023

About the author

Richard Alan Barlow is an Associate Professor at NTU and a former Academic Director of the Trieste Joyce School. He received his MA and MLitt from the University of Aberdeen and his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast.

Richard's most recent book - Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms - was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. His first book, The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture, was published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2017.

Barlow has published articles on James Joyce, David Hume, James Macpherson, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Dion Boucicault, Robert Louis Stevenson, Augusta Gregory, Fiona Macleod, W.B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Sorley MacLean, and Seamus Heaney.

He is an international affiliate member of the Scottish Revival Network and an Outer International Assessment Board member for the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and Postdoctoral Fellowship programmes. He is also a reviewer for James Joyce Quarterly.