BOOK NEWS: Reconceptualizing Nietzsche’s relationship to Irish modernism

Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations 

BY MATTHEW FOGARTY

Liverpool UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781802077223 

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802077223

Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations reconceptualizes Friedrich Nietzsche’s position in the intellectual history of modernism and substantively refigures our received ideas regarding his relationship to these Irish modernists. Building on recent developments in new modernist studies, the book demonstrates that Nietzsche is a modernist writer and a modernist philosopher by drawing new parallels between his engagement with established philosophical theories and the aesthetic practices that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot identified as quintessentially modernist. With specific reference to key Nietzschean philosophemes — eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, transnationalism, cultural paralysis, and ethical perspectivism — it challenges the longstanding assumption that Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is the most ‘Nietzschean’ of these Irish modernists.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

While showing how both Joyce and Beckett are in many important ways more ‘Nietzschean’ than Yeats, this interdisciplinary study makes a number of significant and timely contributions to the fields of Irish studies and modernist studies.

Nietzsche, the Protean philosopher par excellence, must be reinvented by each generation, and yet, in the first decades of the twentieth century, his revolutionary ideas were instrumental in bringing about Irish modernism, here represented by Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. Thanks to Matthew Fogarty’s astute, original, and compelling analyses, we discover an Übermensch speaking with an undeniable Irish accent. —Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

Matthew Fogarty is an associate lecturer at Maynooth University and University College Dublin. He has published articles in the Irish Gothic Journal, International Yeats Studies, Modern Drama, and the Journal of Academic Writing. His latest article is forthcoming in the James Joyce Quarterly. His co-edited collection, Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism, is forthcoming with Clemson University Press.