Nietzsche and Irish Modernism

Nietzsche was a scandal, a revelation, an explosive intellectual force. At the time of his death, the German philosopher was hailed widely as a leading emissary of 'the modern', but his message of cultural transformation resonated nowhere more powerfully than in Ireland.

In Nietzsche and Irish Modernism, Patrick Bixby deftly traces the circulation of the philosopher's ideas in the work of major Irish writers and, more broadly, the Irish public sphere during the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century. George Bernard Shaw styled himself an 'English (or Irish) Nietzsche', as he developed a 'drama of ideas' to advance his radical political philosophy. W. B. Yeats adopted an ethos of 'hard proud gift giving joyousness' from the philosopher as he sought to establish a national theatre in Ireland. James Joyce playfully, and repeatedly, evoked Nietzsche's ideas in his fiction, as he surveyed the forms of thought that might remake the conscience of his compatriots. Before long, Irish priests, politicians, and propagandists also summoned the name of the German philosopher as they addressed an anxious period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. His thoughts would ultimately come to play a role in imagining a different future for both postcolonial Ireland and postwar Europe.

This essential cultural history reveals for the first time how Nietzsche provided Irish culture with resources for new, disruptive modes of thinking and writing, which spoke to both local political circumstances and the predicaments of modernity at large.