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 This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works.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

About the Author
Sean Hewitt is a Government of Ireland Fellow at the School of English, University College Cork. Before joining the School, he was a Leverhulme Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He is a book critic for The Irish Times, and his debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, is published by Jonathan Cape (2020). His current research project explores the influence of natural history and popular science on British and Irish writings, 1870-1930, and won the Maurice J. Bric Medal of Excellence from the Irish Research Council in 2019.

Reviews
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 *
Sean 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198862093
Author Sean Hewitt
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 420g
Dimensions(mm) 224mm * 145mm * 24mm