An Irish literary Bayreuth. Yeats, Joyce and the Revivalist Wagner

After a brief overview of the critically neglected interaction between the apparently local phenomenon of the Irish Cultural Revival and “European” Wagnerism, this essay provides an essential and paradigmatic comparison between the different steps Yeats and Joyce were taking on their Wagnerian trajectory in the transitional years between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Whatever their personal idiosyncrasies and resistances, these Irish Wagnerians and Wagnerites on the threshold between two centuries had good national and nationalist reasons to conceive of such a motley chronotope as an Irish Bayreuth, with its Wagnerianly “transnational, universal significance”. Not surprisingly, “the concept of a national dramatic enterprise” was generated and cultivated at Coole, “reawakening the soul of a nation to its foundational myth, [which] had more in common with Wagner’s Bayreuth than is often recognized”.