Slow folk at work! Literary appropriations of local materials by Irish, Spanish and Bulgarian modernists

Folklore plays a crucial role in the construction of modernist poetry. Especially in a conflict or post-conflict social context, literatures seeking to renew themselves often turn for inspiration to local traditions which they seek to appropriate. When literary criticism studies the link between folklore and literature, it usually does that from a thematic point of view, laying the stress almost exclusively on themes and folkloric motifs. Rarely is the sound of folklore emphasized as a formative influence on modernist poetry. Lying somewhere among the fields of linguistics, folkloristics, ethnomusicology, and literary studies, the present project aims to trace very specifically and directly the crucial influence of local traditions on four modernists.;Chapter one ('Dialectism') examines the ways in which modernists forge an "original" language using folk speech. I examine the hybrid English of J. M. Synge via the prism of second language acquisition, particularly the concept of inter-language. Chapter two ('Poetic Folklorism') studies Yeats's theories of performance, particularly his theories regarding the speaking of poetry and drama, and their indebtedness to folklore. I look at several examples of the 'more practical side' of his work. The centerpiece of the chapter is Yeats's collaboration with Florence Farr in the speaking of verse to musical notes. Chapter three ('Vernacularism') mixes the football chant -- a vernacular poetic genre as well as an example of urban folklore -- with Geo Milev's poem 'September'. It is an audio-print experiment in sounding expressionist poetry. I also examine Garcia Lorca's "flamenco" poetry, his aesthetic theories and their debt to a vernacular vision. I have presented excerpted audio examples as well as a modicum of original work in the CD accompanying the dissertation.