The Irish literary renaissance is the general term for a series of revivals of interest in poetry, drama, and fiction in English which was produced by writers from Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a more detailed sense, it can be seen as starting with the Celtic revival, a period of renewed interest in traditional Irish myths and folklore starting in the 1880's, moving through a middle phase centered around William Butler Yeats and the Abbey Theatre, and finally through a later, explicitly modernist phase, of which James Joyce was the signal writer.