Legacies of Land and Soil: Irish Drama, European Integration and the Unfinished Business of Modernism

Abstract

This chapter examines how Irish rural drama negotiates the tension between land as soil and land as property. Townsend argues that rural dramas such as Rutherford Mayne’s play Red Turf (1911), Padraic Colum’s The Land (1905), and T.C. Murray’s Birthright (1910) commit heresy against the pieties of cultural nationalism by positing material security rather than spiritual inheritance as the foundation for a prosperous Irish future. Largely neglected by literary criticism, these plays also challenge the orthodox story of modernism whereby old-fashioned realism is superseded by avant-garde experiment, much as the rural is superseded the urban. Often performed in the same venues as contemporary avant-garde plays, Irish rural dramas demonstrate that modernism did not progress in a straight line but along multiple intersecting paths.