Music and poetry in irish cultural nationalism

Abstract

In a supplementary perspective in relation to the theses that credit the imaginary constitution of the nation to writing practices such as the printed newspaper and the novel, we highlight the role played, in this imaginative exercise, by literature of oral expression, specifically music and poetry. For this purpose, we focus on cultural nationalism undertaken in Ireland, whose inhabitants, mostly illiterate, depended on oral poetics to imagine themselves as a nation. Thus, we evaluate, through examination of songs and poems produced by Irish nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the contribution of music and poetry to the creation and dissemination of a sense of nationhood among the Irish. By investigating the metaphorization of Ireland as a mother who, in relation to her sons, is sometimes protective, sometimes dependent and sometimes unfair, we scrutinize both the ideological instrumentality of literature as a way to instigate the Irish struggle for decolonization and its subjective effect as channelization of anxieties arising from the colonial experience.