Imagination and Reality

This paper investigates how John Millington Synge uses the theme of imagination in his play The Playboy of the Western World to introduce a critical view of the construction of personal and national identities of those people, Irish people. It argues that the play juxtaposes two contradicted images of the construction of personal and national identities. On the one hand, the play satirizes the way that the villagers use their imagination to create their own hero to help them revive their primitive national identity. On the other hand, it emphasizes the importance of imagination in creating personal identity. The play questions the authenticity of the notion of national identity by depicting it as a human-made phenomenon, but at the same time it makes use of it by showing how imagination helps to change human life.

The Stones of Venice: Lady Augusta Gregory and John Ruskin

John Ruskin’s diaries, letters, lectures and published works are testimonies to his life-long interest in Venetian art and architecture. Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park, County Galway, Ireland, was amongst those Victorian genteel women who were influenced by Ruskin’s account of the political and artistic history of Venice, following in Ruskin’s footsteps during her visits to Sir Henry Austen Henry and Lady Enid Layard at Ca’ Capello on the Grand Canal. This article follows Lady Gregory’s footsteps around the maritime city, where she was often found sketching architectural details of churches and palaces. By doing so, it reveals the extent of the influence of Ruskin’s Italian travels on the formation of Lady Gregory’s aesthetic sensibilities during the 1880s and 1890s, before she founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge and the Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats in 1904. As part of the discussion, it reveals the true subject matter in one of Lady Gregory’s Venetian sketches for the first time, one that is now held in Dublin at the National Library of Ireland.

Dion Boucicault: showman and Shaughraun

Dion Boucicault’s three Irish plays: The Colleen Bawn (1860), Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) and The Shaughraun (1874), while not critically significant, owe their perennial popularity to their appeal to Irish romantic nationalism and to their memorable character types. While Boucicault’s character Myles Murphy or Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the Ponies), an example of his native Irish hero, was the first of a series of rogue heroes that John Millington Synge developed in his character of Christy Mahon, Boucicault also owes the character of Myles to American native heroes like Sam Patch, Davy Crockett and Mose the Bowery B’hoy. While the plays are not great drama, they are good theatre and a less self-conscious national theatre has found room for both Boucicault and Synge.

Oceans Apart: Amitav Ghosh, John Millington Synge, and Weak Comparison

This article compares John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) and Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land (1992), travelogues, histories, and anthropological investigations of maritime societies. Both books tell of a world marked by syncretism and synthesis, and deep and unbroken time, and their narratives are fractured, fragmented, temporally promiscuous, and logically paratactical. In comparing these two books, the article asks what it means, and what it could yield, to read together two accounts of oceanic lives from opposite ends of the twentieth century and from distinct continents and oceans? What emerges is the outline of a ‘speculative practice of weak comparison’ that allows us to extend how we understand the contexts of an object of study called ‘Irish’ literature. By rethinking the scale of Irish literature, the article concludes, we necessarily decentre Ireland, and find opportunities to disaggregate Irish literature and its Irishness, setting a new agenda for comparative studies of Ireland that range widely in space and time.

THE PECULIARITIES OF IRISHISMS IN IRISH ENGLISH WITHIN THE PERIOD OF THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL (END OF THE 19TH – BEGINNING OF THE 20th CENTURY)

The article deals with the analysis of borrowings from the Irish language in Irish English within the period of the Irish literary revival (end of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century) borrowed in the context of linguo-cultural communication. The article also examines the factors that affect the dynamics and productivity of such borrowings, among which – the absence of competitive equivalents in English, a necessity to establish social contacts between English and Irish speakers and cultures, the revival of Irish autochthonous elements, and others. Four main historic periods of borrowings in the course of Anglo-Irish contacts are schematically outlined with the article concentrating on the third period, i.e. the Gaelic Revival. The material for the article is based on the literary texts of the English-speaking Irish authors of late 19th and early 20th cc. (William Butler Yeats, Isabella Augusta Gregory (Lady Gregory), George William Russell (alias AE) and John Millington Synge). The peculiar features of Irish borrowings, their use and functions were examined as well. The expedience for a further study of borrowing tendencies and assimilation of Irish vocabulary in Irish English was substantiated, which would contribute to understanding the mechanisms and consequences of linguistic and cultural interaction in Ireland.

Simbolismo e modernismo na ilustração literária de Harry Clarke

Este trabalho aborda a obra do artista irlandês Harry Clarke (1889-1931), buscando demonstrar a especificidade dos aspectos simbolistas e decadentistas presentes na sua ilustração literária, marcada pela influência do ilustrador inglês Aubrey Beardsley e diretamente ligada ao contexto nacionalista do Irish Revival e do movimento Arts and Crafts irlandês. Como ilustrador, Clarke foi um intérprete, no meio visual, de textos essenciais para o simbolismo de língua inglesa, como A balada do velho marinheiro, de Samuel Taylor Coleridge e os Contos de mistério e imaginação de Edgar Allan Poe, incluindo a poesia nacionalista e medievalizante da primeira fase de William Butler Yeats. Por outro lado, afastando-se do simbolismo profético de Yeats, Clarke também ilustrou textos que problematizavam a dimensão nacionalista do Irish Revival, como a polêmica peça The playboy of the western world, do dramaturgo irlandês John Millington Synge. A análise das relações estabelecidas entre as ilustrações, os textos literários e o seu contexto cultural caracteriza a obra de Harry Clarke como manifestação de um decadentismo tardio dentro do qual eclodem aspectos marcadamente modernos, presentes nas imagens deformantes e insólitas criadas para a edição de 1925 do Fausto de Goethe.

Creative work of Edmund John Millington Synge in literary and critical perception of Korney Chukovsky

The article considers the specifics of Korney Chukovsky’s perception of dramatic art of Edmund John Millington Synge (1871–1909), one of the greatest personalities of national revival of Ireland. Synge, who created his works in English, not only revived legends of his nation, but also expanded the idea of the Irish national originality, having offered his own vision of the image of an Irish of his time. Korney Chukovsky is the author of one of the first translations of Synge’s dramatic art into Russian (a comedy "The Playboy of the Western World") and of the introductory article to its publication in 1923. The article "Synge and His "Playboy"" reflects the Russian writer’s understanding of the moral and aesthetic questions of the play. According to Korney Chukovsky, tSynge's complex art method was formed under the influence of the ideas of revival of the national drama theatre. This direction in perception of Synge’s heritage was determinative in Russian literature and, in general, reflected the nature of the attitude of Russian cultural consciousness to the Irish playwright’s creative work.

Gregory, Augusta (1852–1932)

Born Isabella Augusta Persse in County Galway, Ireland in 1852, Lady Augusta Gregory was a playwright, folklore collector, essayist, and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Following the death of husband Sir William Gregory of Coole Park in 1892, she became a leading member of the Irish Revival, working to establish Irish culture as an alternative to colonial culture and rule. To this end, she published several collections of Irish folklore and established a branch of the Gaelic League at her home at Coole in the west of Ireland. In addition, Gregory hosted and fostered writers at her home in Coole Park, which became a site of meeting and inspiration for writers, including William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, George Russell, and Sean O’Casey. Her most significant contribution to Irish cultural life was through her collaboration with W. B. Yeats, with whom she and Edward Martyn established the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. Gregory also co-wrote Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902) with Yeats, and the two launched the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904, together with J. M. Synge. Gregory wrote plays for the Abbey stage and piloted its development as one of the nation’s most important institutions, overseeing productions of key works by J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O’Casey.