In the sixth and final chapter, I consider the late poems and the curious prose work On the Boiler (1939), which includes the play Purgatory. I emphasize Yeats’s bardic sensibility, which is defined by relations of testament and bestowal and the double burden of witnessing the past and handing down bequests. Generational temporalities characterize the poetry in this period, inaugurated by the historical sequences in The Tower (1928). Yeats’s revivalist attitude toward time, future-oriented by way of a rectifying gaze cast on prior attitudes and achievements, continues to mature in the testamentary poems of this period, in which the modernist bard recreates, because he cannot sustain, a doomed Anglo-Protestant social order. These poems submit the heroes of the literary revival to new conditions of recognition, in which their greatness becomes an inheritance that Yeats, as their bardic representative, both announces and embodies in the world of his work. The antithesis of this inheritance can be found in On the Boiler, specifically in the play that concludes it, Purgatory. The play, Yeats’s last, is a Gothic distortion of the covenant at the heart of the testament. It subjects time and history, personal and cultural inheritance, to a withering critique that highlights both the intellectual pleasures and the potential dangers of the logic of misrecognition.

Built infrastructure, housing, land management etc., are historically conjoined to the legacy of Anglo-Irish big houses. These prominent questions also need to be viewed in relation to ecological imperialism. By 1870, as Kelly Sullivan reminds us in this chapter, there were at least 4,000 big-house estates all over Ireland. In later decades many of these estates fell into disrepair or were razed to the ground by financially strapped owners. In addition, the “violent destruction of close to three hundred big houses during the War of Independence and Civil War (1919–23)” and the repurposing of the remaining houses as “schools, prisons, hospitals, and other institutions [such as] hotels, museums, and tourist sites, or as small privately owned farms,” point to their centrality in Irish geographical, political, and cultural landscapes. However, Kelly argues that although “Big House novels … have undergone a reassessment, with scholars no longer reading them as elegies for an extinct way of life, they are yet to be viewed from an environmental perspective.”

The accretion of Anglo-Irish identity around the symbolic locus of the ‘Big House’ is in many respects a distraction from any socio-economic reality, yet this tradition remains compelling within an Irish literary narrative. This chapter considers the deployment of the genre in relation to the work of Elizabeth Bowen, as it eventually becomes used as a motif through which to explore themes that could scarcely have been thought of when the original Ascendancy homes were built. It queries the accepted relationship between literary setting and social caste, and outlines fresh critical parameters for this recurrent idiom. Initially reviewing works such as Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, published in 1966, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles (1970) and John Banville’s Birchwood (1973), the first part of the chapter argues that these writers reinvigorated Big House fiction through stylish interventions in language and a thematic turn towards metafiction. It then discusses how in the 1970s, under the impact of revisionism, events in the North and the growth of feminism, Jennifer Johnston and Caroline Blackwood reinvented the Big House narrative of Anglo-Irish decline, subverting and parodying the conventions of a genre that until then had seemed stable and familiar.