Assessing the Achievement of J. M. Synge

Subjects:

• Literature » Drama

Reviews:

• Gonzalez has collected 14 new essays addressing John Millington Synge's plays....Several essays recall riots resulting from performaces of his plays, and others remind readers of Syng'e attackes on patriarchalism, on myths about Irish womanhood, and on supersitions arising from institutional religion....Althought this volume offers some new ideas, most important is its reconfirmation of Synge's importance in both the Anglo-Irish and the world literary canons....All academic collections.
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  Choice
• Among its other strengths, this book also offers reasonably balanced coverage of Synge's playwriting career...specialists and generalists alike will benefit from the discussions of lesser-known texts. In short, this book deserves a place in college libraries and in the personal collection of scholars of Irish drama in general.
  —New England Theatre Journal

Table of Contents:

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Resentment, Relevance, and the Production History of The Playboy of the Western World by John P. Harrington
• The Playboy, Critics, and the Enduring Problem of Audience by Ginger Strand
• A Young Man's Ghost: J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and W. B. Yeats's A Vision by Ellen Powers Stengel
• Tragic Self-Referral in Riders to the Sea by Daniel Davy
• Death and the Colleen: The Shadow of the Glen by Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt
• The Wooing of Étaín: Celtic Myth and The Shadow of the Glen by Coílín D. Owens
• Of Holy Wells and Sacred Spells: Strange Comedy at the Abbey by Dan Casey
• "Passing the Gap": Reading the Betwixt and Between of Liminality in J. M. Synge's The Well of the Saints by Carolyn L. Mathews
• "More Matter for a May Morning": J. M. Synge's The Tinker's Wedding by Robert E. Rhodes
• "Cute Thinking Women": The Language of Synge's Female Vagrants by Jane Duke Elkins
• Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows: Defamiliarizing the Myth by Eileen J. Doll
• "Stimulating stories of our own land": "History-Making" and the Work of J. M. Synge by Heidi J. Holder
• The Devil and Auld Mahound: The Trickster Archetype in Synge's Christy Mahon by Way of Rushdie's Muhammad/Mahound by Gale Schricker Swiontkowski
• J. M. Synge's Vagrant Aesthetic by William Atkinson
• Selected Bibliography
• Index