Gregory Castle | Arizona State University (original) (raw)

Books by Gregory Castle

Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer w... more Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats’s revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relations between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats’s revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.

Cambridge University Press, 2019

A History of Irish Modernism brings together new writing on a wide variety of cultural production... more A History of Irish Modernism brings together new writing on a wide variety of cultural production from the 1890s to the 1970s, including examples from literature, film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational perspectives, including Irish-American experiences and artworks. The historical standpoint adopted in each chapter enables our contributors, many working across multiple disciplines, to examine how modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal distances. A History of Irish Modernism attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland—driven by political as well as artistic concerns—even as it embodies aesthetic principles that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and beyond.

Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, editors. Standish O'Grady's Cuculain: A Critical Edition. Syrac... more Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, editors. Standish O'Grady's Cuculain: A Critical Edition. Syracuse University Press, 2016.

Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O’Grady published a three-volume History of Ireland that simultan... more Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O’Grady published a three-volume History of Ireland that simultaneously recounted the heroic ancient past of the Irish people and helped to usher in a new era of cultural revival and political upheaval. At the heart of this history was the figure of Cuculain, the great mythic hero who would inspire a generation of writers and revolutionaries, from W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory to Patrick Pearse. Despite the profound influence O’Grady’s writings had on literary and political culture in Ireland, they are not as well known as they should be, particularly in view of the increasingly global interest in Irish culture. This critical edition of the Cuculain legend offers a concise, abridged version of the central story in History of Ireland―the rise of the young warrior, his famous exploits in the Táin Bó Cualinge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and his heroic death. Castle and Bixby’s edition also includes a scholarly introduction, biography, timeline, glossary, editorial notes, and critical essays, demonstrating the significance of O’Grady’s writing for the continued reimagining of Ireland’s past, present, and future. Inviting a new generation of readers to encounter this work, the volume provides the tools necessary to appreciate both O’Grady’s enduring importance as a writer and Cuculain’s continuing resonance as a cultural icon.

Please see under "Papers" if you want to read the Introducction to this volume. grc

Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. ix + 336 pp.... more Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. ix + 336 pp.

"Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman" is both a literary history of genre and an exploration of the modern, gendered subject. It focuses on James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. My inclusion of English and Irish texts underscores the transnational dimension of modernism even as it calls our attention to important differences in the reception of the Bildung concept. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of “negative dialectics,” I argue that the modernist Bildungsroman stages the failure of its own narrative telos (the dialectical harmony of social responsibility and personal desire) – a failure that does not prevent the modernist hero from perfecting (or trying to perfect) what Johann von Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt called “inner culture” (Bildung). Bildung meant for these thinkers an ideal of self-formation that entailed the harmonious development of an individual’s emotional, ethical, intellectual, artistic and spiritual faculties. For the protagonists of modernist Bildungsromane, this process is often disharmonious, due as much to self-reflection on the Bildung concept as to any kind of repressive function. Adorno’s negative dialectics theorizes this disharmony, in which the negative term of the dialectic, rather than being subsumed into the positive term (of self-identity), asserts its own presence and thereby creates new, sometimes disturbing, contexts for Bildung. Modernist Bildungsromane critique classical dialectical narratives of harmonious self-formation, even as they reclaim a classical conception of Bildung. This transformation of Bildung exemplifies modernism’s radical conservatism, which paradoxically creates alternatives to socially pragmatic educational systems and the ideal of the “subject” they seek to reproduce.

The Literary Theory Handbook. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 312pp. "M... more Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 312pp.

"Modernism and the Celtic Revival" explores the textual means by which anthropology and ethnography contributed to the formation of an Irish national literature. I am concerned in this book with the textual politics of the Celtic Revival (as it was often called at the time, the term “Celtic” denoting the pre-colonial and pre-modern Irish people), especially the work of W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge and James Joyce, whose problematic relation with the Revival signals not only its relevance in post-independence Ireland but also its subversive, self-critical textual strategies. I draw extensively on the tradition of British cultural anthropology from E. B. Tyler (whose "Primitive Culture" was published in 1871) to A. C. Haddon and the Cambridge Anthropological laboratory in Ireland (in the 1890s) to the classical or Modernist anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (whose major ethnographic works were published in the early 1920s). There are many fruitful connections to be made between the discoveries of the new fields of anthropology and ethnography and the literary innovations of the Irish Revivalists, connections which underscore the dual nature of the Revival, for it was progressive politically even while it was complicit with the colonialist tendencies of anthropology. One of my chief claims is that this complicitous relationship determined in significant ways the modernist modality of Revivalist writing. Far from advocating a traditionalist approach to what Seamus Heaney has called the “matter of Ireland,” the Revivalists combined aesthetic innovation with techniques of cultural preservation borrowed from anthropology to produce a distinctive modernist literature and a contentious vision of Ireland’s cultural modernity.

Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 312pp. "M... more Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 312pp.

... Literary theory/Gregory Castle. ... I am especially indebted to Neal Lester, Judith Sensibar,... more ... Literary theory/Gregory Castle. ... I am especially indebted to Neal Lester, Judith Sensibar, Jennifer Parchesky, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Don Nilsen, Sharon Crowley, Mark Lussier, Joe Lockard, Karen Adams, and Keith Miller. ...

Gregory Castle, ed. Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Papers by Gregory Castle

In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, ed. Liam Harte2020), 2020

In Irish Literatature in Transition, 1880-19402, ed. Marjorie Howes, 2020

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, 2019

Oxford Handbook of Irish Fiction, 2020

Irish Literature in Transition: 1880-1940, 2020

Cambridge University Press, 2019

Please see under "Papers" if you want to read the Introducction to this volume. grc

The Literary Theory Handbook. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 312pp. "M... more Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 312pp.

Gregory Castle, ed. Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, ed. Liam Harte2020), 2020

In Irish Literatature in Transition, 1880-19402, ed. Marjorie Howes, 2020

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, 2019

Oxford Handbook of Irish Fiction, 2020

Irish Literature in Transition: 1880-1940, 2020

Science, Technology and Irish Modernism), 2019

A History of the Modernist Bildungsroman, ed. Sarah Graham, 2019

Dublin James Joyce Journal, 2016

This article considers James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a postcolonial Bi... more This article considers James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a postcolonial Bildungsroman avant la lettre, in part because it establishes an attitude toward Bildung that looks beyond idealist and nationalist consolations toward something like global belonging. Central to this vision of the novel as a global form is the philosophical concept of world-making, which I argue conditions the way Joyce’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, understands his own formative desires. This understanding drives him, ultimately, to abandon the options laid out for him by colonial society; to embrace his own inner life and the moments of aspiration that are its outward and visible signs; and to imagine a world in which his “wayward instincts” would count as forms of aesthetic accomplishment. This relationship to inner life entails a relationship to the future that differs from conventional progressive models of self-formation. In A Portrait, Joyce describes a temporality on the order of the future perfect (future anterior) that belongs to the world of the work and the inner life of the artist whose creative power links him to his creation. A temporality of aspiration posits a time for the triumphant recognition of one’s own Bildung, a standpoint that redeems the path toward it from error and misprision. His formative quest is grounded in a relationship between aspiration and freedom that was first articulated by German idealist philosophers like G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schiller. As a child, his sense of freedom at first feels like a new form of bondage; but he soon learns resist the designs others have on him and to follow his own aspirations. His turn to art is the only option left to a young man whose experience of the world has failed to live up to what he could imagine. The bird-girl scene exemplifies the moment when he discovers the power of creating a world and opening himself to the world of others, a power he consciously wields as he composes his villanelle. Through canny and salutary misrecognitions, he moves from his early childhood experiences of méconnaissance, to the moment on the strand and his aesthetic elaboration of it, finally to arrive at a moment of creation, in which the world he creates opens him to the world at large in a new and hopeful way. This, I argue, is the force of the novel’s conclusion, the corrective gaze the young artist casts on his own narrative, from the perspective of his journal entries, which bring his inner life directly into contact with the life of others. Stephen’s Bildungsuche, which liberates him from the world so that he might create a new one, offers a template for postcolonial and global writers who grapple with constraints on freedom and deficits in cultural capital that make aesthetic education all but an impossible dream. In this respect, Joyce bequeaths to postcolonial and global fiction the template for a world in which aspiration forces a heroic path toward the future and new destinies for Bildung.

Twentieth-Century Literature, 2017

“The Consolation of Objects” takes seriously Nietzsche’s call to embrace what is, to love necessi... more “The Consolation of Objects” takes seriously Nietzsche’s call to embrace what is, to love necessity. Amor fati for him entails the ability “to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them.” Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, shows us how this love of fate is tied to the object-world. He first learns, in A Portrait, that words create significance, then learns that objects have a similar role to play in that they harbor a secret significance. He learns that objects and things are not always congruent and that they possess radically different ontologies; the “thingness” or quality of being essential or “noumenal” that belongs to the object as thing is not available for human perception, which must settle for the brute being of the object as given. He tries to understand what lies beyond this given reality, the quidditas (literally “whatness”) or thingness of the object. In Ulysses, Stephen learns a more valuable lesson: what lies in the liminal territory of his apprehension constitutes a knowable element of the object that lies beyond its sensible appearance. The “esthetic image” that illuminates his mind in A Portrait is now understood to be the dialectical image of the object’s withdrawal into being. He learns to accept the promise of the object’s being in the beauty of its necessary withdrawal. The consolation of objects is that they offer artists like Stephen an opening into worlds other than his own, a pathway toward what cannot be known, a half-step toward what all objects conceal.

“In Transit: The Passage of Empire in Stoker’s Dracula.” In Bram Stoker, Dracula. Ed. John Paul R... more “In Transit: The Passage of Empire in Stoker’s Dracula.” In Bram Stoker, Dracula. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. 2nd. ed. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2016. 627-45.

“Destinies of Bildung: Belatedness and the Modernist Novel.” In A History of the Modernist Novel.... more “Destinies of Bildung: Belatedness and the Modernist Novel.” In A History of the Modernist Novel. Ed. Gregory Castle. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 483-507.

History of Modernist Poetry, 2015

“Yeats, Modernism, and the Irish Revival.” In A History of Modernist Poetry. Eds. Alex Davis and ... more “Yeats, Modernism, and the Irish Revival.” In A History of Modernist Poetry. Eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 204-26.

See UCD Scholarcast link for podcast version.

A History of the Modernist Novel

Gregory Castle. Editor. "A History of the Modernist Novel." Cambridge University Press, 2015. ... more Gregory Castle. Editor. "A History of the Modernist Novel." Cambridge University Press, 2015.

A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revises the novel’s history. Drawing on American, English, Irish, Russian, French and German traditions, the contributors challenge existing attitudes about realism and modernism and draw new attention to everyday life and everyday objects, which intensifies the “reality effect” of the narrative, but often in the service of an anti-mimetic intention. This volume charts the development of later experimentalism, in the “high” modernist era, with an overall intent of transforming lived experience into the expressed world of the novel. Developments in characterization, free-indirect style, pastiche and montage effects, together with the expression of new attitudes toward gender and sexuality, freed the modernist novel to explore more fully the materiality of the world it represents and of the world it creates. However, as many of the contributors demonstrate, realism continues to play a role in delineating this world, even when the modernist novel extends its domains into the colonial and postcolonial world, the world of transnational geopolitics and new cosmopolitan forms of belonging. Irish modernists “after Joyce” figure prominently in the 1930s and ’40s, when a sense of belatedness and failure paradoxically energizes the form. In modernism’s maturity, we see many formal innovations in the novel, including serial forms, the “modernist genre novel” and the experimental historical novel. A History of the Modernist Novel suggests that the epoch of modernism was more complex and more continuous with what preceded it and that its development is far from complete.

“ ‘O when may it suffice?’: W. B. Yeats, the Easter Rising, and the Poetry of Difficult Times.” R... more “ ‘O when may it suffice?’: W. B. Yeats, the Easter Rising, and the Poetry of Difficult Times.” Reading Ireland 2.1 (September 2016): 22-32.

For the text of my epipgraph, see the youtube link on this page.

“Confessing Oneself: Homoeros and Colonial Bildung in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a... more “Confessing Oneself: Homoeros and Colonial Bildung in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” In Quare Joyce. Ed. Joseph Valente. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 157-82.

“Postcolonialism.” James Joyce in Context. Ed. John McCourt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres... more “Postcolonialism.” James Joyce in Context. Ed. John McCourt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 99-111

James Joyce Quarterly, Oct 31, 2014

“Coming of Age in the Age of Empire: Joyce’s Modernist Bildungsroman.” James Joyce Quarterly 50.1... more “Coming of Age in the Age of Empire: Joyce’s Modernist Bildungsroman.” James Joyce Quarterly 50.1-2 (Fall 2012-Winter 2013): 359-84. Special issue commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Quarterly.

Reprint of an essay that first appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly 40.4 (Summer 2003).

Rpt. in John Paul Riquelme, ed., A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. A Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2021. 428–448.

MFS Modern Fiction …, Jan 1, 2007

Books reviewed: Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture; Gian Balsamo... more Books reviewed: Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture; Gian Balsamo, Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence and the Messianic Self; Ellen Carol Jones and Morris Beja, eds., Twenty-First Joyce.

“Making it New . . . Again.” The Irish Review 52 (Summer 2016): 27-34

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2015

English Literature in Transition 1880 1920, 2002

English: Journal of the English Association

Victorian Studies, 2015

perialism) concentrate explicitly on the later nineteenth century, and Goldman devotes a terse se... more perialism) concentrate explicitly on the later nineteenth century, and Goldman devotes a terse seven pages to “conservative irrationalism” in the guise of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Maurice Barrès, and Gustav Le Bon at the end of his chapter on the right (712). But the others all anchor their discussion in foundational understandings of the earlier decades: Toews, Pick, Walicki, Bayly, and even Rothschild in complicated ways. Each of the three contributions in part III is similarly weighted. After dealing superbly with the earlier parts of the century, Douglas Moggach concludes his chapter on “Aesthetics and politics” with the briefest of reflections on Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Nietzsche; Claeys ends “Non-Marxian socialism 1815-1914” with a perfunctory nod to “leading trends” after 1875; and Stedman Jones also ends (in his case, given his subject, necessarily) in the 1870s (547). The same holds for the seven chapters of part II: usually legitimately given their topics, Frede...

International Yeats Studies, 2018

James Joyce Quarterly, Jan 1, 2000

James Joyce Quarterly, Jan 1, 2009

James Joyce Quarterly, Jan 1, 2007

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Jan 1, 2005

James Joyce Quarterly, Jan 1, 2008

James Joyce Quarterly, 2010

James Joyce Quarterly, 2011

Modernism/modernity, 2012

Oona Fawley and Katherine O’Callaghan, eds. Memory Ireland, vol. 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memo... more Oona Fawley and Katherine O’Callaghan, eds. Memory Ireland, vol. 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory. In Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies November 2014. http://breac.nd.edu/articles/53711-title/

Irish Literary Supplement, 2012

Sponosred by Journal of International Yeats Studies, 2021

This video is part of the Yeats Conversations series, conducted on July 30, 2021, with Rob Dogget... more This video is part of the Yeats Conversations series, conducted on July 30, 2021, with Rob Doggett, editor of the Journal of International Yeats Studies. A link just below the video will take you to the main JIYS page where you can find other conversations with Yeats scholars.