Modernist Studies Ireland Works in Progress

Tom Walker, Trinity College Dublin

W.B. Yeats, Scholastic Aestheticism, and Cultural Authority in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Chris Collins, University of Nottingham

‘The man went queer in his head’: Synge and the cultural politics of mental health, 1871-1909

Refreshments will be served!

[NB UPDATE: change of 2nd speaker & venue]
Join us for exiting talks by two current Moore Institute Visiting Fellows. Part of MSI’s Works in Progress series, these talks come ahead of the inaugural MODERNIST STUDIES IRELAND conference Fri 17 Sat 18 May 2019 in the Hardiman Research Building. Full programme to follow. https://modstudiesireland.wordpress.com/

Dr Tom Walker is Ussher Assistant Professor in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin.

Dr Walker’s monograph Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time was published 2015 by Oxford University Press. This drew on extensive archival research on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic to illuminate MacNeice’s considerable contact with Irish literary networks and with contemporaneous Irish poetry. It was awarded the 2015 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Other publications include research on the work of John McGahern, the place of the literary within Northern Irish writing, the radio poetry of Richard Murphy, and Irish-British poetic relations at mid-century. He has also recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Modernist Cultures on ‘Collaborative Poetics’.

His current research project is provisionally entitled ‘Yeats and the Writing of Art’. It examines the work of W.B. Yeats through the prism of nineteenth and twentieth-century art writing – encompassing the many textual forms through which art spectatorship and writing were combined during the period, ranging from aesthetic philosophy to art history to exhibition reviews to ekphrastic poems. The project was supported by an Irish Research Council New Horizons Research Project Grant.

Dr Chris Collins is Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Nottingham.

Dr Collins has published widely on Irish theatre, including two monographs on the work of Irish writer, J.M. Synge (Theatre and Residual Culture [Palgrave: 2016], and J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World [Routledge: 2016]). He is currently writing his third book entitled J.M. Synge and The Time of His Life, which considers how Synge’s writings offer an alternative social history of Ireland during the playwright’s lifetime. Synge witnessed and wrote about profound changes to Irish society and culture during his short lifetime: 1871-1909. This was a Victorian age of progress, and everything needed to be clocked: from the time it took the Galway train to travel to Dublin, to those cultures of the empire that had supposedly failed to evolve. Synge had a keen interest in how progress should be measured, and his plays and prose offer unique perspectives on the measurement of time and the modernisation of Irish society. Synge’s fascination with time also had a particular personal appeal. As early as 1899 Synge knew he was dying young. Immediately thereafter he set about travelling Ireland, writing prose, verse and plays about spaces and places that were rapidly changing in front of his eyes. A mixture of biography, social history and critical analysis of his plays and prose, the significance of this project is that it will explore how Synge staged and wrote about linear and non-linear time in the Ireland of his time, both as a reflection on modernisation and as a coping mechanism for the finiteness of time in his personal life.

Chris will be using his time at the Moore Institute to consult the digital archives of Synge’s diaries, journals and notebooks, as well as Abbey Theatre and Druid Theatre digital archives.

NB Dr Antonio Bibbò of the Unversity of Manchester, originally advertised as speaker, has kindly agreed to give a talk later in the academic year. He is currently completing a monograph titled Reception and Perception of Irish Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Italy: Imagining Ireland in Italy. During his time at the Moore Institute, Dr Bibbò intends to investigate understudied aspects of the literary relationship between Italy and Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.