Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School, 1991-2000.
Author: GRENE, Nicholas (Editor).
Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000. 220 pages. Hardback.
John Millington Synge, highly controversial in his own time and long established as a major figure of world theatre, has nonetheless suffered relative critical neglect. Where his great contemporaries Yeats and Joyce, and his outstanding successor Beckett, have attracted whole industries of scholarly attention, Synge by reason of his short life and limited output has been relegated to the unconsidered category of minor classic. This volume of essays, arising from lectures given at the Synge Summer School by some of the most distinguished writers and scholars of Irish literature, sets about the necessary task of interpreting Synge: his relation to cultural and theatrical contexts; the significance of his plays; the distinctive quality of his language and the thematic matrices of his work. Four original poems, specially commissioned for the book, provide an imaginative counterpoint to the critical interpretation of the essays.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Glanmore Eclogue
Seamus Heaney
On the Margins: Synge and Wicklow
Nicholas Grene
Good Behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish Etiquette
R.F. Foster
John Millington Synge and the King of Norway
Frank McGuinness
Keening as Theatre: J.M. Synge and the Irish Lament Tradition
Angela Bourke
On an Island
J.M. Synge
Ar Oilean
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
Synge’s Tristes Tropiques: The Aran Islands
Declan Kiberd
Riders to the Sea: A Revisionist Tragedy?
Tom Paulin
Staging the Irish Peasant Woman: Maud Gonne versus Synge
Antoinette Quinn
All Playboys Now: The Audience and the Riot
Christopher Morash
Re-imagining Synge’s Language: The Czech Experience
Martin Hilsky
Distraction
Gerald Dawe
J.M. Synge and Molly Allgood: The Woman and the Tramp
Anthony Roche
Synge’s Soundscape
Ann Saddlemyer
Synge
Brendan Kennelly
Appendix: Synge Summer School Programmes 1991-2000
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Index
ISBN: 1901866475
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