J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival

J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival
Author: Giulia Bruna
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2017-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0815654111

Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. His body of travel writing includes the travel book The Aran Islands, his literary journalism about West Kerry and Wicklow published in various periodicals, and his articles for the Manchester Guardian about rural poverty in Connemara and Mayo. Although Synge’s nonfiction is often considered of minor weight compared with his drama, Bruna argues persuasively that his travel narratives are instances of a pioneering ethnographic and journalistic imagination. J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival is the first comprehensive study of Synge’s travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement. Bruna argues that Synge’s nonfiction subverts inherited modes of travel writing that put an emphasis on Empire and Nation. Synge’s writing challenges these grand narratives by expressing a more complex idea of Irishness grounded in his empathetic observation of the local rural communities he traveled amongst. Drawing from critically neglected revivalist travel literature, newspapers and periodicals, and visual and archival documents, Bruna sketches a new portrait of a seminal Irish Literary Renaissance figure and sheds new light on the itineraries of activism and literary engagement of the broader Revival movement.

The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters

The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters
Author: Simone O’Malley-Sutton
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2023-11-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9819952697

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.

J. M. Synge

J. M. Synge
Author: Seán Hewitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0198862091

A thorough re-assessment of one of Ireland's major playwrights, J.M. Synge (1871-1909). Using much previously-undiscussed archival material, the book takes each of Synge's plays and prose works, tracing his journey from an early Romanticism to a later, more combative modernism.

Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J. M. Synge

Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J. M. Synge
Author: Hélène Lecossois
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108487793

Explores concepts of performance, modernity and progress by combining performance studies and historical research with contextualised readings of Synge's plays.

ACROSS BORDERS AND TIME: JONATHAN SWIFT

ACROSS BORDERS AND TIME: JONATHAN SWIFT
Author: Csaba Maczelka
Publisher: SPECHEL e-ditions
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2022-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 6150061493

The volume Across Borders and Time: Jonathan Swift contains the papers delivered at the conference The World of Swift; Swift and his World, which was dedicated to the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift. The conference was held on 24-25 November 2017, at the House of Arts and Literature, Pécs, and jointly organised by the Institute of English Studies of Pécs University and SPECHEL, the latter of which is also the publisher of this volume in its series, SPECHEL e-ditions. It also benefited from the support provided by the Irish Embassy in Budapest. That year also marked the 650th anniversary of Hungary’s first university, founded in Pécs in 1367, and so the conference honoured that event, too. In this, the fifth SPECHEL e-dition, series editor Rouse joins up once again with SPECHEL member Gabriella Hartvig, an internationally respected scholar of the period and colleague at Pécs University, together with Irish Swiftian scholar David Clare. The volume comprises a selection of essays emanating from papers delivered at the conference celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift, held in the anniversary year of 2017, and includes a paper delivered by the Irish Ambassador to Hungary that opened the conference. We are grateful to the Irish Embassy for their financial support, as well as to a number of local businesses and the Mayor’s Office of Pécs. The conference was organised by SPECHEL as part of the British and Irish Autumn 2017 series of events, and included a recital of the music of the Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738).

The Aran Islands

The Aran Islands
Author: John Millington Synge
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1912
Genre: Aran Islands
ISBN:

Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime

Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime
Author: Maria McGarrity
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2024-03-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003857612

Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime reveals the primitive sublime as an overlooked aspect of modern Irish literature as central to Ireland’s artistic production and the wider global cultural production of postcolonial literature. A concern for and anxiety about the primitive persists within modern Irish culture. The “otherness” within and beyond Ireland’s borders offers writers, from the Celtic Revival through independence and partition to post-9/11, a seductive call through which to negotiate Irish identity. Ultimately, the disquieting awe of the primitive sublime is not simply a momentary recognition of Ireland’s primitive indigenous history but a repeated rhetorical gesture that beckons a transcendent elation brought about by the recognition of the troubled, ritualistic and sacrificial Irish past to reveal a fundamental aspect of the capacity to negotiate identity, viewed through another but intimately reflective of the self, within the long emerging twentieth-century Irish nation.

Unaccompanied Traveler

Unaccompanied Traveler
Author: Patrick Bixby
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0815655347

At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . insofar as she let herself be known to the public at all.” An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. Unaccompanied Traveler, with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

A History of Irish Literature and the Environment

A History of Irish Literature and the Environment
Author: Malcolm Sen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 824
Release: 2022-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108802591

From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland's island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic - this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.

Travel Writing and Atrocities

Travel Writing and Atrocities
Author: Robert Burroughs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2010-06-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136953434

This book examines eyewitness travel reports of atrocities committed in European-funded slave regimes in the Congo Free State, Portuguese West Africa, and the Putumayo district of the Amazon rainforest during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During this time, British explorers, missionaries, consuls, journalists, soldiers, and traders produced evidence of misrule in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo, which they described their travel and witnessing of colonial violence in travelogues, ethnographic monographs, consular reports, diaries and letters, sketches, photography, and more. As well as bringing home to readers ongoing brutalities, eyewitness narratives contributed to debates on humanitarianism, trade, colonialism, and race and racial prejudice in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In particular, whereas earlier antislavery travelers had tended to promote British imperial expansion as a remedy to slavery, travel texts produced for the three major humanitarian campaigns of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century expressed — and, indeed, gave rise to — changes in the perception of Britain as a nation for whom the protection of Africans remained paramount. Burroughs's study charts the emergence of a subversive eyewitness response in travel writing, which implicated Britons and British industries in the continuing existence of slave labor in regions formally ruled by other nations.