Dr. Brian Cliff

This is a book of essays, edited by Nicholas Grene and Brian Cliff. The project has received very favorable reviews from the readers at Oxford University Press, and is awaiting the decision of the Delegates. The brief period of creative maturity of 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. That has been the starting point for this volume of essays, which uses the work of Synge as entry point for an exploration of the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland. While the Edwardian period has long been considered a distinctive period in Britain, no comparable attention has ever been paid to these years in Ireland. The achievements of the Irish Literary Revival and the national theatre movement have been almost always viewed as part of the broad nationalist resurgence, what Yeats called the 'long gestation', leading up to Easter 1916. A first aim of this book is to change that perspective. Edwardian Ireland is shown to be a period of rapid modernization, the backward-looking preoccupation with orality and folk culture met by the new technologies of mass communication (Morash), the print culture in which Synge participated part of a wider network of late imperial world readership (Allen). This is a time of a new self-conscious sociological awareness in Ireland shown in writers as diverse as George Moore, W.B. Yeats and D.P. Moran (Brown) a period that created its own special sort of 'celebrity culture' (McDiarmid). Whereas the Irish literary and theatrical revival has often been considered in isolation, essays here on the arts and crafts movement (Gordon Bowe), the musical developments of the time (White), and the interaction between Irish and English theatre (Frazier) provide a much more comprehensive set of contexts. We are made aware also of views of Ireland of the time very different from those of the revivalists in the comic scenes of of Somerville and Ross and Percy French (Stevens). Synge is of course best known as a dramatist, and several of the essays in this volume will be concerned with his theatrical practice. But there will be a special concentration in the book on his less discussed prose and on the ethnographic dimensions of his photographs (Carville). It is in these parts of his work that his engagement with the Ireland of his time can be most significantly seen. Though often regarded as an apolitical writer, an image fostered by Yeats, his travel writings reflect a troubled relationship with social problems, his romantic resistance to modernity in The Aran Islands in conflict with more accurate observations of contemporary conditions (Fitzpatrick). His 'local politics', in fact, avoiding attention to well-known political personalities, can be considered exemplary (Mathews). Synge was a highly controversial figure in his own time and beyond, provoking different sorts of criticism in the Edwardian and post-Edwardian periods. But he continued to haunt those who opposed him, whether a political antagonist such as Padraig Pearse (Markey), or James Joyce, often viewed as his aesthetic antithesis, who was forced to come to imaginative terms with Synge throughout his own creative work (Fogarty) This is a book that will change readers' sense of the significance of Synge, and illuminate in a quite new way the era of Edwardian Ireland in which he lived.