For many readers, the Irish and the fantastic are synonymous. From
the ancient texts and medieval illuminated manuscripts to 20th
century poetry, painting, drama, stories, and novels, Irish writers
and artists have found the fantastic not only congenial but
necessary to their art. In his introduction to this collection of
fifteen essays that focus on the fantastic in Irish literature and
the arts, Donald E. Morse contends that the use of the fantastic
mode has allowed Irish writers and artists to express ideas,
emotions, and insights not available through the direct imitation
of everyday reality. Morse argues that for the Irish, the road to
insight was often through the territory of the marvelous and the
fantastic rather than through literalism, rationalism, or logic. In
seeking to arrive at a definition of what constitutes the
fantastic, Morse looks at work by Sean O'Casey and Seamus Heaney
and finds that the fantastic occurs during encounters with what is
considered to be the impossible, a concept contingent upon personal
beliefs. To demonstrate how the fantastic may yield new insights
into human beings, their behavior, feelings, and thoughts, as well
as lead to innovations in art, Morse scrutinizes Circe from James
Joyce's Ulysses, probably the most famous use of the fantastic in
all modern Irish literature. The works of Yeats, Field, Shelly,
Synge, Beckett, Swift, Coleridge, and others are examined in
incisive chapters written from the point of view of the fantastic.
The four-part study begins with a section on Ancient Knowledge and
the Fantastic in which four chapters discuss Yeats's plays; The
Figure of the Mermaid in Irish Legend and Poetry; Ghosts in Irish
Drama; and The Only Jealousy of Emer. In a section devoted to Irish
theatre, music, and painting, the paintings of Jack B. Yeats are
examined for fantastic content and Peter Egri finds parallels
between the work of John Field and Chopin, Shelly, and Turner. The
plays of Synge, O'Casey, Beckett, and Thomas Murphy are the subject
of Part III. The final section considers The Occult, Fantasy, and
Phantasmagoria in Swift, Dunsany, Joyce, and Yeats. The coeditors'
afterword, Looking Backward, Looking Ahead, concludes the volume
which also contains a select bibliography on the fantastic.
Generalists in literature or the arts, students and scholars of
Irish Studies and the fantastic in the arts, as well as those
enamored of things Irish will find this collection resonant with
rich insights into the genre.
General
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