Renegotiating & Resisting Nationalism

The essays in this collection seek to refine our understanding of the often polyvalent and conflicted engagement that Irish dramatists have entered into with nationalism, a cultural and political movement that they have often attempted to simultaneously resist and renegotiate. These nine essays construct a genealogy of dissent, of loyal opposition, revealing the apprehension and dissatisfaction with which the twentieth century’s most influential playwrights have sometimes viewed the Irish state, from its emergence in the early 1900s to its maturity at the century’s end. The articles on W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey reveal the early Abbey Theatre’s struggle to critique the failures of and influence the development of the early state and its proscriptive brand of nationalist Irishness. The essays exploring the later plays of Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Anne Devlin, Christina Reid, Marie Jones, and Marina Carr expose both the conceptual and political failures of mainstream Irishness in the second half of the twentieth century to satisfy the material or political aspirations of people on either side of the Irish border. While many of this collection’s essays share a common postcolonial interpretive strategy, individual articles also employ the strategies of ecocriticism, social anthropology, structuralism, feminism, and nationalist theory.