Parnellites, Playboys, and Pathology: Irish Modernist Drama and the Politics of Sexual Health.

The personal, political, and aesthetic ideals that Irish modernists found embodied in the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell-independence, self-mastery, and a capacity for radical self-fashioning-have been well attested in Irish literary historiography. What has been less often noted is the centrality of sexual health to the conception, articulation, and emulation of those virtues, particularly when attempting to translate Parnell's public persona to the stage. This essay addresses this lacuna by tracing how a medicalized and politicized conception of sex informed Irish modernist efforts to dramatize the Parnell myth at the Abbey Theatre.