The shattered worlds of Standish O'Grady: Myth, history and imagination in nineteenth-century Ireland

The most important contribution of Standish James O'Grady (1846–1928) to the Irish Literary Revival, of which he was considered a founding father, was a theory of Irish racial imagination. His theory draws upon and illuminates the range of intellectual traditions current in Britain in the 1860's and 70's as he applied them to ancient Irish bardic storytelling and his studies of the epic Táin Bo Cuailnge. O'Grady organized his work around a theory of what he called “ideal worlds,” imaginative representations of historical events which formed the basis of shared culture in ancient Ireland. He argued that the work among bards toward the fusion of different narrative “worlds” imagined by Irish bards into a grand and complex epic accompanied and even directed the development of a centralized monarchical civilization in ancient Ireland. O'Grady's ideas on literary idealism contributed to the philosophical basis for the Irish “cultural nationalism” of the 1890's. His involvement in the Revival was tangential, however, and he remained throughout his life an idiosyncratic figure. He applied his theories first in the 1880's toward popularizing Toryism, then in the 1890's toward Unionist politics and preservation of Ireland's protestant gentry, ending his public life, finally, with work on agrarian communism in the early 1900's. A study of O'Grady's writings across his life shows, however, a consistent development of his original theory of “ideal worlds,” and his theories on literary idealism anticipate important concepts elaborated by some late twentieth-century literary and cultural theorists.