Synge and Edwardian Ireland

This book uses the Irish playwright J.M. Synge's plays, prose, and photography to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland. By emphasizing several less familiar Irish contexts - including the rise of a local celebrity culture, the arts and crafts movement, and Irish classical music - this collection shows how Irish folk culture intersected with the new networks of mass communication. Often misunderstood as apolitical, Synge's works display a romanticresistance 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 critics like James Joyce, all of whom were forced to come to imaginative terms with Syngethrough their own work. This book aims to change readers' sense of Synge's significance, and by doing so to illuminate the era of Edwardian Ireland during this period of rapid modernization.

Brian Cliff is Assistant Professor of Irish Studies and English, Trinity College Dublin. Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature, Trinity College Dublin.