Seán 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.
Seán 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.