ABSTRACT
Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) was an important and innovative theorist of the Irish Literary Revival. Her essay “The Felons of Our Land” offers a sophisticated model of popular Irish resistance to British rule. Gregory shows that the everyday culture and practices of ordinary Irish people—popular literature, culture, and reading habits, popular memory, devotional and funerary practices, and even material culture such as home decoration—form a vigorous though subjugated counter-public sphere. The subaltern strategies for subverting and surviving British rule articulated in the essay inform and structure a number of Gregory's one-act plays, including “Hyacinth Halvey,” “Spreading the News,” “The Rising of the Moon,” “Kathleen ni Houlihan,” and “The Gaol Gate.”
