Group-Generated Midterm Review Guide

Based on the 29 October Review Session and on notes by Chris Walker

Teaching Assistants: Christopher Walker and Patrick Mooney
English 150
Fall 2013

Format

1 hour, 3 sections on the test:

• IDs (pick 7 of 9, 10% each); Title, Author, Date, significance (70% of midterm grade)
• short essay (20% of midterm grade)
• definitions (example: "Abbey Riots") (10% of midterm grade)

Major Themes

1. Weight of history
2. Celtic mythology
3. Irish nationalism and its construction; Irish identity
4. Gender identity
   • Irish masculinity
   • Mothers; their presence and absence
5. Love and passion
6. Class; class discrimination; gaps and conflict between classes
7. Mirrors
8. Ireland: the land of emigrants
   • (What is different between "E" and "I" here?)
9. Ireland as idyllic natural space/land and countryside and national identity (the land in Ireland)
10. Problem of Gaelic language
    • Douglas Hyde, The Love Songs of Connacht
    • Synge-song: Gaelic haunts English
    • Bonus question: what is the critical theory Professor Duffy referenced when speaking about this? Answer: Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence
11. Ideologies of the Irish people: Spalpín Fánach; Playboy of the Western World
12. Connection of nationalism and the rural
13. Irish stereotypes
    • the "wild Irish"
14. Religion; blasphemy and irreverence; the Catholic/Protestant cultural divide
15. Repeated poetic forms:
    • Elegies
    • Sonnets

History (brief outline of points discussed in lecture)

1. Ireland's geography and literature is marked by past; Prehistoric peoples: Newgrange ring fort; Celts (story cycles)
2. St. Patrick lights Easter fire (433 CE);
3. Ireland refered to how in dark ages? Island of Saints and Scholars.
4. Dermot MacMurrough invites Henry II of England to help him recover kingdom after Dermot stole the wife of the King of Breifne, Tiernan O'Rourke.
5. Sir Phillip Sidney given land by Queen Elizabeth on a plantation—just one example of appropriation of land by English.
6. Decrease of Irish population: 1830-40, 8 million
7. 1798: first rebellion (inspired by French/US revolutions): Seamus Heaney's Requiem for the Croppies. Who led the Croppies? Father Murphy.
8. 1845 potato blight: Great Hunger — 1 million died
9. 1867 rebellion (the Fenian Rising): beginning of Irish Republication Brotherhood (the forerunner of the IRA)
10. Charles Stewart Parnell: rallied for Home Rule, but abandoned by Catholic church because of affair with a married woman, Katherine "Kitty" O'Shea.
11. ca. 1890: peasants refuse to pay rents in strikes: "Captain Boycott." (You can read more in Wikipedia's article on the Land War.)
12. IRA organized, descended from Irish Volunteers, which where established in 1913 and staged the Easter Rising during East week, April 1916; 1919: Irish Republic established and lead to Irish war of independence lasting until 6 December 1921; then ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922. This split Ireland and the IRA, and resulted in civil war in 1922-23
    1. Patrick Pearse reads the Proclamation of the Irish Republic (Where does he show up in course texts?)
13. Celtic revival before independence—creating the idea of Ireland
14. The Troubles:
    1. In 1960s agitation for civil rights: Catholic/Protestant split
    2. Bloody Sunday (British killed 14 unarmed civil rights protesters).
15. Celtic Tiger: in long view, began 1980s, crashed in 2008

William Butler Yeats: 3 phases:

1. Young, romantic, idealistic; influenced greatly by Celtic mythology and Maud Gonne
2. Political
3. Disenchanted/mystical

What poem imitates the form of Easter 1916? Casualty