Academics applauded a new book which highlights "the liberating energies" of the period from 1899 to 1905 in Ireland.
"Academic publishing is a tough business, which is rarely fashionable or profitable," author P.J. Mathews said when his work, Revival, was launched in the Abbey Theatre this week.
Published by Cork University Press, Revival focuses on social and cultural developments in Ireland including the Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-Operative Movement. It is the 12th publication in the Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs series.
Mathews said his book contradicts the view that this era of high culture was characterised by a backward-looking nostalgia for Celtic and Gaelic Ireland.
"Indeed, it became quite fashionable in the 1980s to blame most of Ireland's social, economic and political problems on the residual dominance of revivalist thinking on Irish life," he said.
Prof Declan Kiberd, who launched the book, said: "Culture, far from being a source of terminal division in the period, was a healing presence in many, many lives. What happened in the Ireland of the 1890s was, as PJ Mathews has demonstrated, repeated in the 1990s."
Other guests included Anthony Roche, of the UCD English department, who knew Mathews when he was "a brilliant MA student 10 years ago"; Derek Hand, who works with Mathews at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, and his wife, Paula Hastings, as well as fellow colleagues Pat Burke and Brenna Clarke, and Sara Wilbourne, of Cork University Press.