Congratulations to PhD Candidate Elsie Unsworth on the publication of their article in the Irish Studies Review – ‘Community, nationalism and folklore collection: a comparison of W.B. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight and Oein DeBhairduin’s Why the moon travels’. The article can be read here. Congratulations, Elsie!
This examination of W.B. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight and Oein DeBhairduin’s Why the moon travels explores the different ways that these two collections of Irish folklore grapple with identity and marginalisation. The comparison highlights shifts in literary representations of Irish folklore. The relationship between idealism and conflict within the two texts implies a continued interest in folklore as an embodiment of wider cultural and political changes. Yeats and DeBhairduin both engage with the process of documentation and this article examines how they imagine “folklore” and “folklorist,” and the implication of this within wider cultural trends like nationalism and political advocacy. Yeats’s work is concerned with poetics of nation, envisioning an essential Irishness in Romanticised Celtic antiquity. DeBhairduin is concerned with communities – specifically Irish Travellers – that this essentialising nationalism excludes. These distinctive approaches to folklore shape authorship, the use of motif, and relationship with oral storytelling in each text.