Negotiating Identity: Subversion and Conformity in Modernist Irish Drama

This paper explores how subversion and conformity negotiate identity in modernist Irish drama, focusing on the works of W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, and Sean O'Casey. In the light of the sociopolitical transformation of Ireland at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, these playwrights were using innovative dramatic techniques to explore the complex interplay between personal and national identity. Yeats used myth and symbolism to explore an Irish mass consciousness based upon remembering the past-as in Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Countess Cathleen. Synge shocked the traditional views of heroism, sexual roles, and idealism within the countryside in The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea-to show the circumscription levied by a conventional society. O'Casey gave voice to class struggle and religious conformity in plays such as The Plough and the Stars and Juno and the Paycock, works which reveal the conflict of agency versus collective identity. In this way, this research will investigate how modernist Irish drama served as a site of cultural negotiation and resistance and, at the same time, contribute to the broader understanding of how literature operates in the creation and challenging of national ideologies. It thereby underlines the relevance of these plays for contemporary debates on identity, nationalism, and cultural politics, showing how their themes keep pace with ongoing debates on gender, class, and power. In conclusion, this research positions modernist Irish drama as a medium of change that reflects and challenges emergent dynamics of identity formation.