[DOWNLOAD] "Introduction (Editorial)" by Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Introduction (Editorial)
- Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Reference,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Language Arts & Disciplines,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 321 KB
Description
The current Special Issue of the Irish University Review on Lady Gregory was prompted by a double impetus, at once commemorative and exploratory. In the centenary year of the Abbey Theatre the occasion to acknowledge the work and contribution of one of its founders readily presents itself. However, it seems equally pressing to probe the problematic legacy of a woman writer and cultural and political activist who has become a strangely absent or vexed presence within accounts of the Revival period and within the selective and still male-dominated annals of Irish literary history. How we make sense of Augusta Gregory should be of as much moment as our shifting relations to, and constantly mutating understanding of, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and J. M. Synge but the persistent erasure or demotion of female voices within Irish cultural consciousness automatically stamp this a minor concern or even a non-issue. It is perhaps because of this reluctance to grant due weight to women writers that Lady Gregory enjoys a literary afterlife in contemporary Ireland more as a symbolic icon than as an author in her own right. Brenda Silver has examined the way in which the posthumous circulation and proliferation of visual depictions of Viriginia Woolf have endowed her with a fame that is resolutely independent from the actual historical figure and her works. She argues, moreover, that what she dubs the 'versioning' of an artist, that is the production of multiple variants of her image, may allow us to study the diverse and often contradictory meanings cryptically inscribed in such symbolic renderings. (1) While representations of Lady Gregory do not have the same currency as those of Woolf, they are nonetheless familiar and frequent counters in Irish cultural self-constructions. Her portrait stands sentinel on the stairs of the Abbey Theatre and is featured in the gauzy centenary banner decorating its facade. Reproductions of her image are de rigueur in both academic and popular histories of the Irish stage and in tourism literature promoting Coole Park, Gort, and Sligo with its much-vaunted Yeats country. Her demesne is a national park and, almost uniquely amongst Irish women writers, an annual conference, the Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering, has provided a forum for analysis of her writing since 1995. A local museum, the Kiltartan Gregory museum, is dedicated primarily to her life and achievement, and a newly-built hotel in Gort also bears her name.