Drawing on Raymond Williams's theory of cultural materialism – on Williams's distinction between dominant, emergent and residual cultures more specifically – Christopher Collins explores the various aspects of pre-Christian Ireland's residual culture that J. M. Synge (1871–1909) weaves into the narratives and the dramaturgy of his plays. Collins argues that in Synge's use of cultural beliefs such as animism, pantheism, folklore or magical ritual lies the playwright's mordant critique of the ideology of the bourgeois, Catholic modernity that was dominant in nationalist, fin de siècle Ireland.

Besides the introductory and concluding chapters, the book comprises six chapters, each of which is devoted to the critical study of one of Synge's plays and the cultural residues that it dramatizes. Only the last, unfinished play of the dramatist, Deirdre of the Sorrow (1910), is not granted detailed analysis: being set in pre-Christian Ireland, it is seen as ‘unable to engage with residual sensibilities for culture’ (p. 2).

Chapter 1 presents the argument of the book and situates Synge politically, belying Yeats's assumption that Synge ‘was unfitted to think a political thought’ (p. 13). It highlights what Synge took from his reading of Marx and Engels and his study of socialism in order to define the dramatist's conception of modernity, i.e. one predicated less on anti-capitalism than on the fetishization of the Irish peasantry. Chapter 2 insists on the influential role played by Synge's study of comparative social science and his stays on the Aran Islands in his dramatization of the residual culture of pre-Christian Ireland. It argues for the centrality of pantheism, i.e. the belief according to which the natural world forms a divine unity, in Synge's first and unfinished play, When the Moon Has Set. Chapter 3 reads The Tinkers’ Wedding (1909) as a blueprint for the familiar Syngian opposition between the alienating structures of bourgeois materialism and the freedom that adherence to residual culture grants marginal characters. The modernity of the Catholic Church is put into historical perspective, which sheds helpful light on Synge's critique of religious marriage and civil domesticity. The different, at times incompatible, sets of belief to which the character of the Priest subscribes, i.e. the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church, popular Catholicism and fairy belief, are studied in detail. Chapter 4 engages with the bearing of the work of philosophers such as Spinoza and Schopenhauer on Synge's conception of pantheism in The Shadow of the Glen (1904). Chapter 5 interrogates the cottage-kitchen realism of Riders to the Sea (1904), which is repeatedly challenged by the irruption of the supernatural, and argues that the play partakes of magical realism insofar as it entails a questioning of the conventions of realism, including ‘causality, motivation and materiality’ (p. 116). Following on Declan Kiberd's analysis of Synge's use of folklore, Collins emphasizes the centrality of fairy belief in Riders and proposes a well-informed and very convincing study of ‘the pig with black feet’ (p. 125) as a manifestation of the supernatural. Chapter 6 draws on the notes on hagiography that Synge took while working on The Well of the Saints (1905) and apprehends the Saint as an avatar of the figure of the tramp, which Synge uses to criticize the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Chapter 7 proposes a similarly enlightening reading of The Playboy of the Western World (1907) in the context of the shocking 1895 case of Bridget Cleary, a young Tipperary woman accused of being a changeling and burnt to death by her husband and father.

While Synge's debt to pre-Christian Ireland's residual culture has been underlined by critics such as Nicholas Grene, Declan Kiberd, Mary C. King, Mark Phelan and Lionel Pilkington before, no full-length study had until now been devoted to the issue. The book is extremely well documented, drawing on extensive archival material and proposing careful readings of the philosophical texts which had a lasting influence on Synge's writings, prominent amongst which is James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890). In historicizing Synge's plays and taking folk belief seriously, Collins's book offers an important contribution to postcolonial readings of the Irish Literary Revival and will be of enduring interest to scholars of Synge and of Edwardian Ireland.