Synge and Edwardian Ireland

Edited by Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene

Fresh readings of major works such as The Playboy of the Western World and The Aran Islands
New view of Synge's relationship with other major figures of the time, including James Joyce and Patrick Pearse
First study of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period
Essays by major authorities in Irish history, music, theatre, and art history, as well as literary and cultural studies

Synge and Edwardian Ireland

Edited by Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene

Description

The dramatic career of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, from his first plays in 1902 to his premature death in 1909, almost exactly coincided with the years of Edward VII's reign. Those years have long been studied in a British context, but Synge and Edwardian Ireland is the first book to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period. By emphasizing several less familiar Irish contexts for Synge's work - including a new sociological awareness, the rise of a local celebrity culture, an international theatre context, the arts and crafts movement, Irish classical music, and comedic writing by Somerville and Ross - this collection shows how the Revival's preoccupation with folk culture intersected with the new networks of mass communication in the late imperial world.

Although Synge is best known as a dramatist, this book concentrates on his prose and the ethnography of his photographs, the work in which his engagement with Edwardian Ireland can be most significantly seen. Often misunderstood as apolitical, Synge's writings and photography display a romantic resistance to modernity alongside their more accurate observations of contemporary conditions. It is through this ambivalent modernity that his work continued to haunt not just advocates like W.B. Yeats but even Synge's critics, including Padraig Pearse and James Joyce, all of whom were forced to come to imaginative terms with Synge through their own work.

This book aims to change readers' sense of Synge's significance, and by doing so to illuminate in a quite new way the era of Edwardian Ireland during this period of rapid modernization.

Synge and Edwardian Ireland

Edited by Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene

Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Foreword, R.F. Foster
Introduction, Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene
Part I: Edwardian Ireland
1. The Edwardian Condition of Ireland, Terence Brown
2. Synge's Typewriter: the Technological Sublime in Edwardian Ireland, Christopher Morash
3. Stalking Yeats: the Celebrity System of Revivalist Dublin, Lucy McDiarmid
4. Synge and Edwardian Theatre, Adrian Frazier
5. Preserving the Relics of Heroic Time: Visualizing the Celtic Revival in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland, Nicola Gordon Bowe
6. Synge, Music and Edwardian Dublin, Harry White
7. Political Animals: Somerville and Ross and Percy French on Edwardian Ireland, Julie Anne Stevens
Part II Synge: Contexts and Comparisons
8. Synge and Modernity in The Aran Islands, David Fitzpatrick
9. Synge, Reading, and Archipelago, Nicholas Allen
10. Travelling Home: J.M. Synge and the Politics of Place, P.J. Mathews
11. With his "Mind-guided Camera": J.M. Synge, J.J. Clarke and the Visual Politics of Edwardian Street Photography, Justin Carville
12. The price of kelp in Connemara: Synge, Pearse, and the idealisation of folk culture, Anne Markey
13. Ghostly Intertexts: James Joyce and the Legacy of Synge, Anne Fogarty
Bibliography

Synge and Edwardian Ireland

Edited by Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene

Author Information

Brian Cliff is Lecturer in Irish Studies and English at Trinity College, Dublin where he is a director of the undergraduate degree programme in Irish Studies. He has published extensively on contemporary Irish literature and is the co-editor (with Eibhear Walshe) of Representing the Troubles: Texts and Images, 1970-2000 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).

Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His books include The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Shakespeare's Serial History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Yeats's Poetic Codes (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has co-edited two volumes in the Irish Theatrical Diaspora series, Irish Theatre on Tour (Carysfort Press, 2005), with Chris Morash, and Interactions: Dublin Theatre Festival, 1957-2007 (Carysfort Press, 2008), with Patrick Lonergan.

Contributors:

Nicholas Allen, National University of Ireland, Galway
Terence Brown, Trinity College Dublin
Justin Carville, Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
David Fitzpatrick, Trinity College Dublin
Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin
R. F. Foster, Hertford College, Oxford
Adrian Frazier, National University of Ireland, Galway
Nicola Gordon Bowe, National College of Art and Design
Anne Markey, Trinity College Dublin
P.J. Mathews, University College Dublin
Lucy McDiarmid, Montclair State University
Christopher Morash, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Julie Anne Stevens, St Patrick's College
Harry White, University College Dublin