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.

This essay explores how Yeats’s engagement with the culture of art amid which he found himself in the mid-to-late 1910s – set against the backdrop of local and global conflict and political rupture – coalesces around the prominence of portraiture both in his own poetry and the broader art world during the preceding couple of decades. More particularly, several of the poems complexly arranged across both versions of The Wild Swans at Coole (1917 and 1919) and in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), often in contradistinction to their date of composition, offer a dialectic of portraiture and anti-portraiture – conceived of as a decided resistance to or evasion of this mode. This dialectic evokes the possibility of aligning art and the aesthetic to a vital combination of self-realisation, sociability and visionary power. It also though recognises the contrary possibility that, in retrospect, such a notion of art and the aesthetic might constitute a gross misunderstanding of the ‘danger’ that lies ‘in the body’ – to quote a troubling line from the opening, title poem to Michael Robartes and the Dancer.

Abstract Yeats has proved tricky to accommodate within accounts of modernist poetry. This has led to an attempt to extricate Yeats from the very story of modernist poetry, a retrospective critical paradigm that has damagingly dominated the anglophone literary academy since the late 1960s. Whether seeking to connect or disassociate Yeats from modernism, though, most critical assessments have broadly followed a traditional understanding of modernism as a loose affiliation of movements, while recent decades have seen attempts to reckon with modernism in other terms, in particular the sociological perspectives of the so-called ‘New Modernist Studies’. The publication practice pursued by Yeats from the early 1900s on, whereby initial limited-edition publications from his sister’s Dun Emer/Cuala Press were followed by trade editions, and the shifting textuality and materiality of Yeats’s publications, were as much a part of his modernism as developments in style and subject matter. Yeats has been a significant presence within modernism’s institutionalization—as attested to by the poet’s prominence in modernist journals such as The Little Review and The Dial. His work as the embodiment of his artistic personality has already become instituted as a protagonist in a broader cultural drama, transforming himself into a representative figure within what is coming to be perceived as a cultural epoch.

Published in 1821, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties was an important influence on Marx’s analysis of ‘disposable time’ in a section of his Grundrisse notebooks known as the ‘fragment on machines.’ That analysis has inspired rethinking of Marx’s mature work by authors ranging from Raniero Panzieri, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno to Moishe Postone, yet those re-evaluations do not account for the contribution of the 1821 pamphlet. This article examines the neglect of the pamphlet and offers suggestions about what could be gained by attention to this foundational text.

The phrase Irish modernism is a relatively young one. It entered the critical lexicon back in the 1990s and has only come into widespread use over the last decade. There were of course previously m...

W. B. Yeats’s early work ambitiously attempts to reconstitute cultural authority in late nineteenth-century Ireland and Britain. Yet much of the artistic and critical ground that he was attempting to overturn remains somewhat unexplored. This essay places the young poet against the backdrop of a burgeoning and increasingly interconnected critical, aesthetic and academic culture then operating not only in Britain but also in Ireland. More particularly, it examines how Yeats’s early journalism deployed an amalgamation of aesthetic disinterest and cultural nationalism to contest the authority of a Dublin clerisy then bent, in his own terms, on scholasticizing the cultural field. It also relatedly considers how such authority was not only mediated in but also partly constituted by late Victorian British and Irish periodical culture.

This chapter discusses E.R. Dodds’s relationship with modern poetry. While he is very much known as a professional classicist rather than poet, Dodds might still be enlighteningly thought of as a poetical scholar. This is not only in the sense that his scholarship relates to his attempts to write poetry or that he followed in the footsteps of his academic mentor Gilbert Murray. Rather, his academic work was partly informed by the modes of thinking and feeling that were embodied in the work of the modern poets he admired, while his words and ideas also had some impact on certain contemporary poets. The chapter then traces the intertwined relationship between Dodds’s developing scholarly interests—particularly in relation to questions of metaphysics and mysticism—and his engagement with modern poetry in the case of two of the poets he considers to have been the best of his lifetime: W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice.