Revival in the West: Emily Lawless’s and J. M. Synge’s Islands of Authenticity

Giulia Bruna, in her chapter, offers a comparative framework for discussing the different strategies of J. M. Synge and Emily Lawless for achieving an authentic representation of the otherworldly geography of the Aran Islands, which was so much a part of the folklore of the region. Synge’s The Aran Islands, often treated as a spiritual autobiography, offers a way of reading the West of Ireland that complicates our understanding of authentic Irishness. While he derives a sense of authenticity through largely documentary and ethnographic rather than fictional means, Lawless, in Grania, captures an authentic sense of rural Ireland through the formal arrangements of the novel. Bruna is concerned with identifying, in Synge’s and Lawless’s work, modes of plural and dialogic authenticity that recognizes the “parasitic” relation of culture to nature. Bruna concludes that their versions of authenticity, though different in methodology, serve the same revivalist purpose of shaping Irish cultures for future generations.