Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018 Art, Drama, Politics Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries Series

This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin?s immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Eglantina Remport is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where she teaches modern Irish literature, Victorian literature, and Modernist literature. She holds a Ph.D. from the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Addresses for the first time Ruskin’s immense influence on the period of the Irish Revival Represents a pioneering study of the influence of nineteenth-century aesthetic, social and political movements on artistic and social discourse in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century Combines the latest research within the field of Irish Studies with that within the field of Victorian Studies