Appropriation emerged during the Celtic Revival as a singular mode of engaging with the Shakespearean text to conceptualise and frame national identities in Ireland using the English language. With The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare's Wake, Adam Putz has examined the ways in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics shaped the Shakespeares of Matthew Arnold, Edward Dowden, and W. B. Yeats. His close readings underscore the instability of the binary oppositions upon which these writers relied to predicate their appropriations. However, Putz finds in James Joyce an urgent concern for the pernicious manner in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics mediated the relationship with Shakespeare for a generation of Irish men and women. Therefore, Putz reconsiders periodization and literary inheritance, the nation and modernity in order to point up the contingency of those values located in and imposed upon Shakespeare during the Revival.

This book reconsiders the Celtic Revival by examining appropriations of Shakespeare, using close readings of works by Arnold, Dowden, Yeats and Joyce to reveal the pernicious manner in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics informed the critical paradigms that mediated the reading of Shakespeare in Ireland for a generation.