A Variety of Responses to and Engagement with J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats in American Literary Works

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Published: Dec 1, 2021
Keywords:
modernism, postmodern, intertextuality, paratexts, creative appropriation, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, American and Irish literary relations

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Mária Kurdi

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the appearance of J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats in American literature written in the last hundred years. The argument departs from recent critical ideas about the contact points between Irish and American literary production in the context of modernism. American authors who allude to, borrow and quote from various texts and themes by the two Irish writers range from Eugene O’Neill to Susan Howe. The appropriation of material rooted in Irish culture enables American writers and poets to use it in the form of intertexts and paratextual elements to enhance the scope of meanings in their own works. A scrutiny of interfaces, affinities and resonances between modern Irish and American literary texts advances knowledge about the role they can have in sustaining the powerful transnational expressiveness as a characteristic of these two literatures.

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How to Cite
Kurdi, Mária. 2021. “A Variety of Responses to and Engagement With J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats in American Literary Works”. AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 17 (1). https://iskolakultura.hu/index.php/americanaejournal/article/view/45458.
Issue
Vol. 17 No. 1 (2021)
Section
Essays
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Mária Kurdi

Mária Kurdi is professor emerita in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Pécs, Hungary. Her research focuses on modern Irish, American and British drama and theatre. She has published seven books and edited or co-edited several essay collections. Her own books include Representations of Gender and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Irish Drama by Women (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2010), Approaches to Irish Theatre through a Hungarian’s Lens (University of Pécs, 2018) and a monograph on J. M. Synge in Hungarian (Pécs: Kronosz, 2021). Her edited volumes include Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (co-edited with Miriam Haughton, Carysfort Press, 2015) and a collection in honour of Arthur Miller’s birth a hundred years before (AMERICANA e-books, 2015). She has scholarly articles in international and Hungarian journals and essay collections. In 2022 The Theatre of Deirdre Kinahan, co-edited by Mária Kurdi and Lisa Fitzpatrick is forthcoming with Peter Lang. Currently she is editing one of the HJEAS Books, New Series, on age, ageing, ageism in contemporary Anglophone literatures and theatre, to be published in 2022.