
Identity can easily be transformed by several reasons: religion, society, nationalism, culture, and etc. Then what should have affected Irish identity the most, and what kind of identity did Irish have as the result? I wanted to answer this question, and the first theme I focused on was Irish independence, which made me choose to analyze and compare these two authors: James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, who showed opposite attitude against Irish Literary Revival. Bonnie K. Scott helped me to understand why Joyce showed negative attitude against Irish Literary Revival with a mention about his individualism in his journal, John Eglinton: A Model for Joyce’s Individualism, describing the characteristic of Joyce that did not allow him to belong to any kind of thought. On the contrary, Yeats had this eager to have his own country from his young age, according to William Butler Yeats’s “John Sherman”: An Irish Poet’s Declaration of Independence, which brought him to be immersed in Celtic myth. In this research, I would like to thoroughly discover how different their writing become due to their opposite attitude.
I really like this topic and I think you can do a lot with it, and you would have to show exactly where both texts show the divergence in opinions. I think it would be neat to add Joyce’s conflicts with the Catholic Church as a factor/influence of this too, since Catholics were more for nationalism while Protestants were in favor of British rule.