Theatre and Nationalism in 20th-Century Ireland

Great moments of theatrical achievement have often coincided with moments of national excitement and tension. In Ireland,  after the death of Parnell in 1891, cultural and political nationalists had urgent need of each other’s vitality and vision, as both worked towards the common goal of liberating Ireland from British political and literary domination. But the political and cultural nationalists were destined to part company when the reality of an independent state seemed imminent: artists began to face the truth about their country and themselves and portrayed Ireland as it was, not as the nationalists wished to be.

This book is about the writers who moulded the mind of modern Ireland: Yeats who saw in the dramatic movement the successful overturning of the doctrines that had dominated his country since the days of Young Ireland; Synge and O’Casey who presented with uncompromising brutality the suffering of Irishmen who found little solace in nationalistic abstractions, whose only weapons for survival were their own native cunning, imagination, and with; Shaw who regarded nationalism as a necessary but retrograde step that stood between Ireland its proper place in a wider European community; Beckett who takes us beyond roots and nationalism and whose work seems to imply that nationalism in either a political or cultural sense is now outdated and outstated.

The essays in this volume were first presented at the second inter-university seminar in Irish Studies held at St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. The contributors are experts in the field of Irish Studies: David R. Clark, George Mills Harper, David Krause, Thomas MacAnna, Roger McHugh, Ann Saddlemyer, Michael J. Sidnell, Francis Warner, and Robert O’Driscoll.

This is not, however, an arbitrary collection of papers, but the first systematic exploration of modern Irish drama since Una Ellis-Fermor’s The Irish Dramatic Movement in 1939. It covers the period from the founding of the Abbey Theatre to the work of Samuel Beckett. This volume is essential reading for everyone interested in modern Irish history and literature.

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