Untilled Field

'The Untilled Field' is a novel by Irish author George Moore. Father Tom and Father Maguire are the local parish priests in a village. They are, of late, quite concerned with the declining moral standards of the village not least the 'drinking' and 'dancing' that seems to attract the younger villagers. But the greatest scandal comes when a young couple have a child out of wedlock. Now the church must do all they can to ensure the couple carries out a church wedding.

“Nearly every major figure of his era,” writes his biographer Adrian Frazier, “worked with Moore, tangled with Moore, took his impression from, or left it on, George Moore.” The Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore (1852–1933) espoused multiple identities. An agent provocateur whether as an art critic, novelist, short fiction writer or memoirist, always probing and provocative, often deliberately controversial, the personality at the core of this book invented himself as he reinvented his contemporary world. Moore’s key role—as observer-participant and as satirist—within many literary and aesthetic movements at the end of the Victorian period and into the twentieth century owed considerably to the structures and manners of collaboration that he embraced. This book throws into relief the multiple ways in which Moore’s work can serve as a counterbalance to established understandings of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary aesthetics both through innovative scholarly readings of Moore’s work and through illustrative case studies of Moore’s collaborative practice by making available, for the first time, two manuscript plays he co-authored with Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) in 1894. It is this collaborative practice in conjunction with his cosmopolitan outlook that turned Moore into a key player in the fin-de-siècle formation of an international aesthetic community. This book explores the full range of Moore’s collaborations and cultural encounters: from 1870s Paris art exhibitions to turn-of-the-century Dublin and London; from gossip to the culture of the barmaid; from the worship of Balzac to the fraught engagement with Yeats; from music to Celtic cultural translation. Moore’s reputation as a collaborator with the most significant artistic individuals of his time in Britain, Ireland and France in particular, but also in Europe more widely, provides a rich exposition of modes of exchange and influence in the period, and a unique and distinctive perspective on Moore himself.

From the 1890s until the 1920s, a great tide of literary invention swept Ireland. As the country struggled for political independence, the writers who formed the Irish Literary Revival created a new, authentically Irish literature. Some, such as W. B. Yeats, John Synge, and Lady Gregory, celebrated the mystical tradition of Ireland's west; others, such as Sean O'Casey, explored Dublin's crowded streets and tenements. This fascinating, revealing, and beautiful book examines the relationship between these writers and the towns and countryside that fueled their imaginations. Part history, part biography, and part travel guide, A Journey into Ireland's Literary Revival takes the reader to Galway, the Aran Islands, Mayo, Sligo, Wicklow, and Dublin. Along the route, it visits the cottages and castles, crags and glens, theaters and pubs where some of the country's finest writers shaped an enduring vision of Ireland.

'The Untilled Field' is a novel by Irish author George Moore. Father Tom and Father Maguire are the local parish priests in a village. They are, of late, quite concerned with the declining moral standards of the village not least the 'drinking' and 'dancing' that seems to attract the younger villagers. But the greatest scandal comes when a young couple have a child out of wedlock. Now the church must do all they can to ensure the couple carries out a church wedding.

The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast, The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by interpreting the Revival through the concept of “complexity,” a theory recently developed in the information and biological sciences. Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival’s various components operated as parts of a network but without any overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival’s elements can be seen to have come together under the heading of a single objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity, political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the Revival’s individual parts involved conflict and cooperation, difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.

The Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) was a very significant and often controversial figure on the literary stages of Paris, London and Dublin at a key cultural moment. Between 1880 and 1931, his creative involvements included spells with literary theatres in London and Dublin, jousts with the daring and repression of the fin de siècle, and a hail-and-farewell to Yeats and the Irish Revival. This collection of essays offers fresh insights into diverse elements of his œuvre and reflects some of the wide variety in Moore’s literary innovations, influences and legacy. Contributors note his pioneering contributions to the short story, his penetrating insights into Greek classical literature, his avant-garde feminism and egalitarianism, and – what may surprise 21st-century readers of biblical-theme blockbusters - his sensitive but contentious novelistic treatment of the historical Jesus. In this volume, there are studies of sophisticated composition, and fresh approaches to textual analysis. The multiple Moore talents are scrutinised, myths are dispelled and new evidence is uncovered for historic linkages. George Moore’s anticipation of Freudian psychological insights and his engagement with Darwinian theses are but two of his close involvements with key nineteenth-century figures. Manet, Degas, Parnell, Kant, Maupassant, Gladstone, Zola, Marx and Woolf must feature on the list of names that are inseparable from Moore’s life and work. Yeats and Joyce also loom large and their under-acknowledged indebtedness to Moore poses difficult questions for literary history. While Moore’s own debt to French artistic influences, English models, and Irish heritage has long been recognised, perceptions of Moore’s writing from outside the Anglophone world highlight issues that demand further consideration. This multi-faceted author is well-served by these new studies that, in turn, suggest additional avenues yet to be explored.

"Writing Ireland is a provocative and wide-ranging examination of culture, literature and identity in nine-teenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. Moving beyond the reductionist reading of the historical moment as a backdrop to cultural production, the authors deploy contemporary theories of discourse and the constitution of the colonial subject to illuminate key texts in the cultural struggle between the colonizer and the colonized. The book opens with a consideration of the originary moment of the colonial relationsip of England and Ireland through re-reading of works by Shakespeare and Spenser. Cairns and Richards move then to the constitution of the modern discourse of Celticism in the nineteenth century. A fundamental re-reading of the period of the Literary Revival through the works of Yeats, Synge, Joyce and O'Casey locates them in a social moment illuminated by detailed considerations of poems, playwrights and polemicists such as D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh. Writing Ireland examines the psychic, sexual and social costs of the decolonisation struggle in the society and culture of the Irish Free State and its successor. Beckett, Kavanagh and O'Faolain registered the enervation and paralysis consequent upon sustaining a repressive view of Irish identity. The book concludes in the contemporary moment, as Ireland's post-colonial culture enters crisis and writers like Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Seamus Deane grapple with the notion of alternative identities. Writing Ireland provides students of literature, history, cultural studies and Irish studies with a lucid analysis of Ireland's colonial and post-colonial situation on which an innovative methodology transcends disciplinary divisions."--