In 1891, Rosa Mulholland expressed her regret at observing that Irish writers, upon publishing a successful first novel, inevitably abandoned the country in order to ‘live their lives pleasantly and in affluent circumstances in the busy, working, paying world of London’. For Irish writers of the later nineteenth century, the physical (not to mention conceptual) relocation that Mulholland depicts as inevitable was often spurred by the need for easy access to the infrastructure of the publishing industry, much of which was centred around the publishing hubs of London and Edinburgh. However, such a move did not necessarily guarantee future success or stability. This article considers the careers of three nineteenth-century Irish writers, Annie French Hector, Justin McCarthy, and Charlotte Riddell, through their interactions with two major London literary institutions: Mudie's Select Library, one of the most prominent suppliers of fiction to the Victorian reading public, and the Royal Literary Fund, which provided bursaries to struggling writers. Records drawn from a large-scale data analysis of Mudie's catalogues suggest that these authors felt obliged to comply with the library's well-known preferences, but at times could also leverage previous successes in order to make unconventional commercial or literary choices. By contrast, the archive of the Royal Literary Fund emphasises the precarity inherent in the novelist's career, while also rendering visible the ways in which these writers understood the moral and ethical aspects of their work. Such data-rich literary histories, when read alongside these writers’ (semi-) autobiographical works, contribute to our understanding of how Irish writers navigated London-based publishing markets in the late nineteenth century, and how they conceptualised their professional roles and obligations, both toward their audiences and to others within their community.
Irish writers increasingly gain international recognition and academic attention. More than the fleeting popularity of single authors, the rise of Irish writing is to be attributed to the material conditions of Ireland's massively subsidised creative economy. It is also linked to the country's institutionalisation of creative writing and its ongoing financial commitment to the arts. Fuelled by art exports, this commitment distinguishes it from other literary industries. Based on interview data from CrEIC (Creative Economy Ireland Corpus), the article traces the formation and reconfiguration of the Republic's cultural infrastructure since the 1990s. It maps the distinct post-austerity structures of literary production that have enabled both emerging and published authors to start and maintain creative careers within and beyond Ireland. The analysis reveals how the Irish government - through institutions such as the Arts Council and the Irish Writers Centre, among others - engages monetarily across all stages of the creation, production, reception, and circulation of literature. Its subsidised literary infrastructure has cultivated a distinct pen-to-publication pipeline that nurtures local literary talent and carries emerging writers to the global Anglophone marketplace. The article reconciles institutional, material, and social conditions of writing to assess how Irish writers are positioned in a fast-growing (g)local literary economy.
Irish literature was introduced to Japan, and attracted its people, as Japan was striving to catch up with Western countries in the late nineteenth century. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, born in Greece to an Irish father, played a key role in introducing Irish literature, especially W. B. Yeats, to Japanese readers. This essay first explores how Hearn's lectures at the Imperial University reveal a fundamental contradiction between his ideals and Japan's modernising efforts. It then examines how recent projects based on Hearn's work have contributed to the global marketplace. Some of his students and, in turn, their students became prominent novelists, dramatists, translators and scholars, contributing both to the creation of new Japanese literature and to the establishment of a strong tradition of Irish literary studies in Japan. As a result, not only is Hearn's presence found everywhere in Japanese culture but also he has been commodified in Japan's consumerist society, and recently on the international market as well. Many different versions of translations of his ghost stories have become a Japanese cultural asset, while reading performances of his work attract domestic and international audiences. His favourite local towns, distant from metropolitan cities, contain his museums and attract tourists; souvenirs with his name and image sell well. Hearn's fame is one example of how Irish literature has become a part of Japanese culture, attracting Japanese consumers.
This essay investigates Irish literature of contemporary migration in conversation with fictional narratives of migration in European Literature. It will consider how authors Melatu Uche Okorie and Oona Frawley engage with movement from the Global South to the Global North, focusing in particular on migrations from the African continent. The construction of Irish racial whiteness depends on an exclusion of ethnic bodies that do not fit within the idea of nation, as seen with the 2004 citizenship referendum. The essay investigates frames of euro-centric whiteness on migration narratives and outlines the role of the literary marketplace, including the important role of small presses such as Tramp Press and Skein Press, on these texts. The racial identifiers of white Irishness form the inclusion/exclusion binary, meaning non-white, and non-Irish bodies are excluded. This trope is seen in some contemporary Irish migration fiction which, rather than focusing on the stories and agency of their black characters, instead re-centres whiteness. This essay aims to showcase how migration narratives in Ireland, and the global marketplace, can often be framed through a centring of euro-centric whiteness, and how writers maintain or challenge these expectations. Tracing connections between the texts, this essay will identify common tropes and themes of contemporary migration narratives, demonstrating in the process how work published by small presses can counteract these discourses.
The last decade has seen the publication of many large-scale, multi-authored essay collections related to the study of literature and culture by major academic presses such as Routledge, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press. This unprecedented wave of multi-author histories, companions, handbooks, and overviews has become a notable yet largely unexamined phenomenon in Irish studies. This article attempts to describe and understand the growth of this specific media for literary criticism and scholarship by attending to some of the economic conditions shaping its production, mediation, and consumption. This is a form of publishing seemingly shaped not so much by any intellectual developments as by the nature of the contemporary marketplace within academic publishing. A key aspect of this marketplace is the move towards publishing via digital platforms. This article explores how such technological and economic imperatives are determining the content of the field of literary criticism and scholarship on Irish writing.
Ireland, shaped by its colonial history and mass migration, has long been entwined with international networks of labour exchange and cultural transaction. Irish literature is likewise inseparable from the global literary marketplace in which it is produced, distributed, and sustained beyond the country's borders. In response to recent scholarship on the publishing industry, book history, and the creative economy, this special issue explores the largely uncharted terrain of Irish literature in the context of the global marketplace from the nineteenth century to the present day. We evoke the global marketplace in both its symbolic and physical dimensions: as a site formed by infrastructure and business practices; as a space where monetary and cultural capitals are exchanged and accrued; where individual agents navigate institutional forces; and where literature is produced, circulated, and consumed.
This article examines subscription practices in the social and cultural economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ireland and beyond, and identifies different types of subscription project. Moving beyond understandings of subscription as a fundraising mechanism, it demonstrates how subscription lists shaped cultural production, literary reputation, and public engagement. Through an analysis of diverse subscription schemes - from the Dun Emer Press to the Abbey Theatre and Sylvia Beach's Ulysses - the article illuminates how subscription practices enabled women's cultural leadership, facilitated proto-diplomacy, and strengthened transnational networks spanning Dublin, London, Paris, New York, and beyond. By examining subscription as material infrastructure that structured the literary field, this study elucidates the mechanisms that enabled the Irish Revival's extraordinary international reach and demonstrates continuities between Revival practices and modernist publishing strategies.
This essay examines the role played by literary agents in bringing the work of Irish writers into the global marketplace. Adapting Laura McGrath's notion of ‘corporate taste’ (the claim that agents exercise their taste through a synthesis of aesthetic and market imperatives), this essay suggests that in the case of agents of Irish writers, this might usefully be reframed as ‘global taste’. Agents frequently smooth the frictions between the local scenes in which Irish writing tends to be developed, and the global markets that promise to support a sustainable literary career. The essay begins by placing the role of agents in Irish literary culture in historical context and goes on to survey the existing field of Irish authors and their agents. Drawing upon a set of interviews conducted with agents, authors and publishing professionals, it then considers how ‘global taste’ might be experienced by authors. It ends with readings of two contemporary Irish novels to suggest how the stakes of agenting might be inflected by the geographical and imagined distance between Irish authors and the international markets in which their work circulates.
This essay works to establish contributor demographics for Lady of the House, Ireland's foremost mass-market women's magazine at the turn of the twentieth century. To do so, it focuses on contributions to its 'Women's Parliament' section, which solicited short reader responses to a wide range of questions primarily dealing with women's place in society. Because the 'Women's Parliament' feature ran every month from 1894 until 1924, it presents a rare and valuable opportunity to map the magazine's demographics (including age, address, religion, and number of servants) based on its actual contributors. A fuller understanding of the magazine's readership will in turn shed light on its unique commercial model: established on behalf of prominent Dublin grocer Findlater and Company, the Lady of the House was free to the store's clients, but its longevity suggests that it quickly found popularity well beyond the grocer's clientele. Working from its own quantitative findings, this essay also explores how the Lady of the House's 'implied reader' - the one inferred on the basis of material within the magazine - compares to its 'actual readership' as represented by the quantitative data amassed in the first part of the essay. By tracing the divergences between these readerships, the essay offers insights into the reading habits of early twentieth-century Irish women and into the Lady of the House's aspirational readership.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, an extraordinary number of Irish writers gravitated towards radio as an important outlet for their short fiction. Radio writing allowed them to reach almost half a million listeners at home at a time when the magazine market for stories was dwindling, and publication opportunities were scarce. Authors became increasingly dependent on the wireless marketplace for financial remuneration and to sustain their literary careers. This article shows how writers who understood and submitted stories that aligned with Radio & Eacute;ireann's narrative preferences - such as a recognisable 'Irishness' and an emphasis on plot, dialogue, and surprise endings over psychological introspection - were most successful in getting their stories broadcast on the wireless, as were those willing to adapt their work to suit the medium's technological specificities. The essay examines the poetics of the radio story and argues that the editorial suggestions imposed by radio producers, scriptwriters and features officers often ran counter to the poetics of the modern short story as it was favoured and practiced by prominent Irish literary figures such as Se & aacute;n O'Faol & aacute;in and Mary Lavin. The final section reads a selection of story scripts by Mary Lavin, Maura Laverty and James Plunkett and demonstrates how their stories at Radio & Eacute;ireann differed from their broader literary output.
