Introduces students to the work of one of Ireland's most important playwrights.

Collects all of Synge's published plays, including The Playboy of The Western World, along with his Poetry and Translations, and the prose works that detail his travels in The Aran Islands, In Wicklow, In Kerry and In Connemara.

Publisher Description

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to Irish modernism, offering readers an accessible overview of key writers and artists.

This book is a complete re-assessment of the works of J.M. Synge, one of Ireland's major playwrights. The book offers the first complete consideration of all of Synge's major plays and prose works in nearly 30 years, drawing on extensive archival research to offer innovative new readings. Much work has been done in recent years to uncover Synge's modernity and to emphasise his political consciousness. This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works. Tracing his journey from an early Romanticism through to the more combative modernism of his later work, the book's innovative methodology treats text as process, and considers Synge's reading materials, his drafts, letters, diaries, and journalism, turning up exciting and unexpected revelations. Thus, Synge's engagement with occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, and even a late reaction against eugenic nationalisms, are all brought into the critical discussion. Breaking new ground in ascertaining the tenets of Synge's spirituality, and his aesthetic and political idealization of harmony with nature, the book also builds on new work in modernist studies, arguing that Synge can be understood as a leftist modernist, exhibiting many of the key concerns of early modernism, but routing them through a socialist politics. Thus, this book is valuable not only to considerations of Synge and the Irish Revival, but also to modernist studies more broadly.

A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major themes of this important poet's life and career.

A fully revised second edition of this multi-author account of Canadian literature, from Aboriginal writing to Margaret Atwood.

The essays in the present volume are dedicated and written in tribute to Professor Mária Kurdi upon celebrating her 70th birthday. As a multifaceted scholar, Mária is known for her enduring contribution to the wide field of literary studies, her main research areas being modern American and British drama, drama theory, and comparative literary studies. An internationally renowned scholar of modern Irish literature and culture, she is also well known for the many ways in which she has promoted Irish studies in Hungary. This is the third volume in the SPECHEL e-ditions series.

This book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges. It sheds a new light on “May Fourth” and on the Irish Renaissance by establishing that the Irish Literary Revival (1900-1922) provided an alternative decolonizing model of resistance for the Chinese Renaissance to that provided by the western imperial center. The book also argues that Chinese May Fourth intellectuals translated Irish Revivalist plays by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O’Casey and Synge and that Chinese peasants performed these plays throughout China during the 1920s and 1930s as a form of anti-imperial resistance. Yet this literary exchange was not simply going one way, since Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics. Therefore this was a reciprocal encounter based on the circulation of Anti-colonial ideals and mutual transformation.

This wide-ranging Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama offers challenging analyses of a range of plays in their political contexts. It explores the cultural, social, economic and institutional agendas that readers need to engage with in order to appreciate modern theatre in all its complexity. An authoritative guide to modern British and Irish drama. Engages with theoretical discourses challenging a canon that has privileged London as well as white English males and realism. Topics covered include: national, regional and fringe theatres; post-colonial stages and multiculturalism; feminist and queer theatres; sex and consumerism; technology and globalisation; representations of war, terrorism, and trauma.