DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

J. M. Synge

Nature, Politics, Modernism

Seán Hewitt author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:7th Jan '21

Should be back in stock very soon

J. M. Synge cover

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 This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works.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.

immensely impressive...Synge is explored here with insight and originality. [...] An authoritative new reading of the full corpus of Synge's work, which is also a kind of intellectual biography. * Roy Foster, Honorary Fellow, Hertford College, Oxford *
Seán Hewitt's J.M Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism gives a rich account of the three areas of its title. Nature is the bedrock of all Synge writes, modernism the shock of the new that comes from his development as a playwright; and politics a force that emerges more fully from pressures exerted on his writing by contemporary events in Ireland. But the real originality and power of the study are in the confluence of the three, the way Hewitt manages to hold these diverse topics in the one critical frame. Synge is far from dead yet. * Anthony Roche, Irish Times *

ISBN: 9780198862093

Dimensions: 224mm x 145mm x 24mm

Weight: 420g

256 pages