Performative and Textual Imaging of Women on the Irish Stage, 1820-1920: M.A. Kelly to J.M. Synge and the Allgoods

This book explores the way women, specifically women perceived or presented as Irish, were represented on the Dublin stage by playwrights and actors from the 1820s to the 1920s. Rather than being a feminist reading of modern Irish theatre, this book present a nationalist and socialist reading of the theatre in its cultural and historical contexts. The argument of this book is that as the stage image of the Irish woman modernized from the early nineteenth into the twentieth, it mirrored the modernization of Ireland.