Celtic Revival

Celtic Revival covers a variety of movements and trends, mostly in the 19th and 20th centuries, which drew on the traditions of Celtic literature and Celtic art, or in fact more often what art historians call Insular art. Although the revival was complex and multifaceted, occurring across many fields and in various countries in North-West Europe, its best known incarnation is probably the Irish Literary Revival (also called the "Celtic Twilight"). Here, Irish writers including William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, "AE" Russell, Edward Martyn and Edward Plunkett (AKA Lord Dunsany) stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature and Irish poetry in the late 19th and early 20th century.

In many, but not all, facets the revival came to represent a reaction to modernisation. This is particularly true in Ireland, where the relationship between the archaic and the modern was antagonistic, where history was fractured, and where, according to Terry Eagleton, "as a whole had not leapt at a bound from tradition to modernity". It was a corollary, and part of, the general movement of medievalism; it came to be recognised that England too had a pre-Saxon Celtic heritage.

Perhaps the most widespread and lasting contribution of the Revival was the re-introduction of the Celtic Cross shape used in the medieval high crosses, which now forms a familiar part of monumental and funerary art over most of the Westernized world.