J. M. Synge

This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.

Classics and Irish Politics

This chapter provides a contextualized overview of the contents of the book Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016. Rather than summarizing each chapter in order of appearance and according to the subsections of the volume, the introduction draws alternative thematic connections across the different chapters. Strands of interpretation include: the different political implications of Irish authors identifying with Greece, Rome, or indeed Carthage; the imperial contexts of neoclassical architecture; pivotal figures such as Patrick Pearse, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney; the significance of the Irish Literary Revival and the Irish language; classical reception vs. the classical tradition as a theoretical framework; the Classics in Irish education.

Epic Modernism

This chapter explores how James Joyce transvalues epic, the novel, and Ireland in tandem through an encyclopaedic multi-perspectivalism. Writers of the Irish Literary Revival engaged within a variety of genres but they especially privileged drama and poetry as the vehicles for a recrudescence of an authentic Irish identity. As a counter to this, Joyce’s writings implicitly and explicitly make the case that the kind of transvaluation requisite to an Irish Revival could be better accommodated through the genre of the novel, in that only the novel was sufficiently malleable and protean to encompass the heterogeneities that were often suppressed or ignored amongst various discordant factions of the Revival. This chapter shows how in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce exults in the heteroglossia afforded by the novel by making it a vehicle for a multitude of concurrent perspectives and for languages that are mixed and multiple.

The Materialist-Fabulist Dialectic

This chapter examines the contrasting uses of folktale, fantasy, realism, and satire in the works of James Stephens and Eimar O’Duffy, two key fabulist authors of the Irish Literary Revival. The rendering of ancient mythological material and folk beliefs into modern fiction constitutes a distinct sub-strand of fiction of the Revival era. Running counter to this appeal to ancient forms in many instances was a resort to modes of irony, parody, and social realism to comment upon the disparity between romantic ideals and material realities in pre- and post-independence Ireland. In their most aesthetically successful works, Stephens and O’Duffy draw liberally from each of these trajectories in a manner that changes the fundamental meaning of each by providing a new and different manner of representing politics.

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.

Irish Literary Revival

The Irish Literary Revival — also known as the ‘Irish Literary Renaissance’ or ‘The Celtic Twilight’ — describes a movement of increased literary and intellectual engagement in Ireland starting in the 1890s and occurring into the early twentieth century. As a literary movement, the Irish Literary Revival was deeply engaged in a renewed interest in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage as well as the growth of Irish nationalism during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Irish Literary Revival was only a part — though a significant one — of a more general national movement called the ‘Gaelic Revival’, which engaged in Irish heritage on the intellectual, athletic, linguistic, and political levels. For instance, the Literary Revival coincided with the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893, which sought to revive interest in Irish language and culture more broadly. The Irish Literary Revival is also sometimes referred to as the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival because it revitalized Irish literature not through the Irish language, but in English. In addition, many of its leading members were part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class. As a movement, the Irish Literary Revival is difficult to encapsulate, partly because of the range and reach of its various members, and also because the work that emerged from it was often experimental and widely diverse in focus, style, and genre.