This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.

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This chapter develops the tensions inherent in Synge’s early works towards an understanding of his formal innovation, asserting the ‘time pressure’ of his one-act plays as a dimension of his response to modernity. Synge’s drafts for various articles, particularly ‘The Old and New in Ireland’, and an article on social change in Wicklow, combine with his notes on Herbert Spencer and evolutionary theory to show a writer deeply conscious of modernization and literature’s responsiveness to modernity. Contributing to and drawing on new work on the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernism, this chapter shows that the structures and plots and Synge’s one-act plays Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen are rooted in a battle of temporalities. By comparing the timescales of Synge’s one-act plays to those of his Revivalist contemporaries, this chapter shows that his reading in sociology, philosophy, and evolutionary science, alongside his experiences in the modernizing ‘Congested Districts’ of Ireland, fundamentally affected his literary output. Fractured communal relations are figured as fractures in the time frames of the drama, and the overlapping of temporalities and levels of modernization find their correlatives in the constant and unresolved competition for dominance from any one conception of time. These plays, far from being isolated from the concerns of modernization, or from reverting to a solely romanticized vision of the peasantry, in fact register a sense of formal instability as a result of their fraught and multiple conceptions of time and space.

In the archives of the Yale Center for British Art there is an album of pressed plant, flower, and seaweed specimens. This material artefactassembled by an unknown collectorfeatures plates from across the Atlantic archipelago, or what Andrew McNeillie has described as the "unnameable constellation of islands on the Eastern Atlantic coast" (2007, vii). Preserved between 1856 and 1863, Welsh seaweeds from Aberystwyth, and ivy from Glasplant and Llechryd (Figure 1) are carefully placed within the same scrapbook as specimens from the Bog of Allen (Figure 2), Carrickfergus, the Isle of Wight, Sussex (Figure 3), and Somerset. Confounding taxonomical distinctions, the plants and flowers are sometimes arranged aesthetically, rather than according to genus and species. While the anonymity of this particular collector adds to the emphasis on the non-human, the collector of another such album of botanical specimens highlights women's engagement with natural history and knowledge production across these islands. Madeleine Mathiss's album, for example, contains 30 specimens of seaweed and includes samples collected on the south coast of England (Torquay, Brighton, and Southend) and on the northern coast of Ireland (Glenarm, Co. Antrim). Through travel across the islands and regions of the archipelago, these collectors sought to group the flora of the countries together as an interconnected and mutually-enhancing whole. Linking the biota of the archipelago in single albums, they are alert to distinguishing features and environments, offering points of similarity and contrast. Such albums demonstrate an archipelagic awareness not only to the study of the natural world and natural history, but also of travel routes, knowledge production, imaginative association, and the relationship between human and non-human worlds in the nineteenth century. They embody both the material reality of an archipelagic archive as well as demonstrate an archipelagic methodology.Studies of the intertwined histories of what historian J.G.A. Pocock coined "the Atlantic Archipelago" (1974, 8) have given rise to the critical field of archipelagic studies. As in John Kerrigan's seminal work, Archipelagic English (2008), the cover of which shows the familiar image of Great Britain and Ireland on a map tilted, reaching out from mainland Europe and into the Atlantic, this involves a new and historically grounded perspective on geography, identity, and the relations between nations and islands. Kerrigan's study of seventeenth-century "English literature" delves deep into the ways in which these islands constituted "interactive entities" (2008, vii).

Folklore was, for Yeats, ‘at once the Bible, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer’. It constituted a sort of primitive, and importantly living, text. It was proof of the primacy of the symbolic, the importance of the anti-rational, and the reality of spiritism. The folk tales collected by Yeats in Fairy and Folk Tales and in later anthologies during the 1890s suggest correlations with things in this world and their parallels in an ‘other’ world, though what constituted this ‘other’ world could be subtly adapted to suit Yeats’s reading audience. This chapter shows how Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, a resolutely Irish book, is clearly presented both to wider metropolitan readership and to a more niche audience of occultists who were looking to Ireland, through a trend for Celticism, for spiritual teaching.