Chapter 1 establishes the contours of the Irish Revival and revivalism as we have come to understand both today. Understood as a constellation of movements, discourses, and practices, the Revival was a modernizing force in a media environment that encouraged multiple visions of Ireland’s past and its future. My discussion of the Irish Revival and revivalism situates Yeats’s literary revivalism within a broader cultural context. I argue that the Revival’s message was often constructed in a modern media environment as part of a process of remediation, whereby revivalist texts, often first published in the daily newspapers, were republished and recontextualized so that they might be recognized anew and with greater understanding. These texts also served a remedial function – that is, they were part of revivalist emphasis on self-improvement. Yeats, in concert with revivalists across a wide political spectrum, helped forge the idea of a national consciousness and a modern national literature in which the legends of ancient Ireland would find a place.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.

In the ninety-year period between the start of the American Revolution and the end of the Civil War, American Protestantism underwent a profound transformation. Protestant churches and ministers engaged on both sides of the revolutionary struggle and argued over the relationship between church and state in constitutional deliberations. Religious liberty emerged as an article of faith; religious populism grew; and new Protestant denominations proliferated, reinforced by the dynamics of western expansion along the unfolding American frontier. Industrialization, immigration, home missions, and the growth of the Black church added to the diversity and richness of Protestant Christianity, as did the explosion of reform movements and the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening. Yet abolitionism and the sectional crisis of the 1840s and 1850s further segmented religious organizations into Northern and Southern divisions, until in the Civil War Protestant theology and piety coursed through both Union and Confederate societies.

While Frederick Douglass’s fame as an ex-slave and man of letters is widely known over two continents, Europe and North America, his career as an evangelistic orator outside of the United States is far less familiar to Douglass scholars. With attention turned toward a religious consideration of Douglass’s career as local preacher, then international abolitionist in the revivalist tradition, this article connects Douglass to a specifically black form of prophetic performance against the Pharisaism of proslavery Christianity in the U.S. South. In increasingly agnostic and humanistic terms, Douglass voiced his antislavery jeremiad against American Christianity in a months-long public performance of revivalistic speech-making in Christian England and Ireland in 1845-47.