This book uses J.M. Synge's plays, prose, and photography to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland. By emphasizing less familiar contexts, including the rise of a local celebrity culture, the arts and crafts movement, and Irish classical music, it shows how Irish folk culture intersected with the newnetworks of mass communication. The dramatic career of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, from his first plays in 1902 to his premature death in 1909, almostexactly coincided with the years of Edward VII's reign. Those years have longbeen studied in a British context, but Synge and Edwardian Ireland is the first book to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period. By emphasizing several less familiar Irish contexts for Synge's work - including a new sociological awareness, therise of a local celebrity culture, an international theatre context, the artsand crafts movement, Irish classical music, and comedic writing by Somervilleand Ross - this collection shows how the Revival's preoccupation with folk culture intersected with the new networks of mass communication in the lateimperial world.Although Synge is best known as a dramatist, this book concentrates on his prose and the ethnography of his photographs, the work in which his engagement with Edwardian Ireland can be most significantly seen. Often misunderstood as apolitical, Synge's writings and photography display a romantic resistance to modernity alongside their more accurate observations of contemporary conditions. It is through this ambivalent modernity that his work continued to haunt notjust advocates like W.B. Yeatsbut even Synge's critics, including Padraig Pearse and James Joyce, all of whom were forced to come to imaginative terms with Synge through their own work.This book aims to change readers' sense of Synge's significance, and by doingso to illuminate in a quite new way the era of Edwardian Ireland during this period of rapid modernization. INDICE: Abbreviations Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Foreword Introduction Part I: Edwardian Ireland The Edwardian Condition of Ireland Synge's Typewriter: the Technological Sublime in Edwardian Ireland Stalking Yeats: the Celebrity System of Revivalist Dublin Synge and Edwardian Theatre Preserving the Relics of Heroic Time: Visualizing the Celtic Revival in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland Synge, Music and Edwardian Dublin Political Animals: Somerville and Ross and Percy French on Edwardian Ireland Part II Synge: Contexts and Comparisons Synge and Modernity in The Aran Islands Synge, Reading, and Archipelago Travelling Home: J.M. Synge and the Politics of Place With his <"Mind-guided Camera>": J.M. Synge, J.J. Clarke and the Visual Politics of EdwardianStreet Photography The price of kelp in Connemara: Synge, Pearse, and the idealisation of folk culture Ghostly Intertexts: James Joyce and the Legacy of Synge Bibliography
- ISBN: 978-0-19-960988-8
- Editorial: Oxford University
- Encuadernacion: Cartoné
- Páginas: 288
- Fecha Publicación: 17/11/2011
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés