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no t e s introduction. rerouting irish modernism: postcolonial aesthetics and the imperative of cosmopolitanism 1. Indeed, Anne Saddlemyer asserts in her edition of Synge’s letters that Synge ultimately considered his experience staying on the Blaskets “even more valuable than that of [visiting] Aran” and notes that Synge discussed with Yeats the prospect of gathering an acting troupe of Blasket Islanders which Yeats seemed to take seriously enough to note in a letter: “[W]e will have to consider it presently. Synge would stage manage it himself” (1: 102– 3). References to the Blaskets recur in Synge’s letters after his visit there, including a July 1906 letter noting that he hoped to return there after finishing Playboy (1: 177) and an August 1907 letter expressing a desire to write a book on the Blaskets that might complement his famous volume on the Aran Islands (2: 22). Synge’s interest in the Blaskets remained strong to the end of his short life as evidenced by his report to his fiancée on a doctor’s visit eight months before his death noting that his physician advised him against a trip there (2: 171). Despite their ongoing presence in his thoughts, however, Synge never returned to the Blaskets after his initial 1905 visit. 2. For some of the key discussions of primitivism and modernism, see Torgovnik ’s Gone Primitive (1990); Manganaro’s collection Modernist Anthropology (1990); Barkan and Bush’s collection Prehistories of the Future (1995); and Mattar’s Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (2004). 3. This is not to say, however, that late-modernist aesthetics are necessarily incompatible with a more radical nationalist politics as O’Faoláin’s republican critiques amply illustrate. 4. See, for example, Ellmann’s Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden (1967); or Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce (1962) or A Homemade World (1974). 5. The same caution should apply, of course, to modernist criticism that emphasizes local dimensions and is informed by an Irish studies perspective or that of a similar national or regional studies scholarship. Manganaro’s work just makes this point more unavoidable. 6. For considerations of the Irish and colonial dimensions of Irish modernism , see, for example, Lloyd’s Anomalous States (1993); Nolan’s James Notes 214 Joyce and Nationalism (1995); Cheng’s Joyce, Race, and Empire (1995); Attridge and Howes’s collection Semicolonial Joyce (2000); and Lloyd’s Irish Times (2008). 7. Other relevant treatments of modernist form and postcoloniality in different contexts include Gikandi’s Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (1992); Hedrick’s Mestizo Modernism (2003); and Pollard’s New World Modernisms (2004). 8. This adds to the burgeoning body of scholarship exploring Beckett’s Irish and postcolonial dimensions as exemplified by Bixby’s Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (2009); Morin’s Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (2009); Kennedy’s edited volume Beckett and Ireland (2010); and David Lloyd’s ongoing work. 9. See, for example, David Lloyd’s “Republics of Difference: Yeats, MacGreevy , Beckett”; and Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds., Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s. 10. See Terence Brown’s “Ireland, Modernism, and the 1930s,” esp. 37–38. 11. In the Irish case, the most interesting recent discussions of these early postcolonial magazines are those offered by Shovlin in The Irish Literary Periodical, 1923–1958; and Allen in Modernism, Ireland, and Civil War. 12. See Beckett’s 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry” (75), collected in Disjecta . Strikingly, Beckett includes O’Faoláin among the avant-garde poets now being “re-discovered” by scholars of 1930s Irish modernism even though O’Faoláin never had a profile as a poet. At the very least, this “error” may suggest an awareness on Beckett’s part of a shared late-modernist sensibility between this more typically modernist poetry and the ostensibly more conventional prose being developed by O’Faoláin and his coterie. 13. See Cleary’s Outrageous Fortune, esp. 111–79. 14. As Whelan observes, the outbreak of “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland only serves to accelerate this redefinition of terms as “tradition” increasingly comes to be dissevered from modernity and defined as “atavistic” and “savage” or, at best, “dangerous”and “benighted” (190–92). 1. modernity’s edge: speaking silence on the blaskets 1. Peig Sayers’s slightly later autobiography, Peig (1936), was actually dictated to her son Micheál Ó Gaoithín rather than being written by her directly. As Peig is from a slightly later...