Feminist literary retrieval projects in Ireland quickly embraced the bibliographical and hypertextual possibilities offered in the early 2000s by the then burgeoning field of digital humanities. This essay examines the printed prehistory of projects such as the Women in Modern Irish Culture Database and the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (volumes IV and V), demonstrating how this genealogy has shaped the nature and impact of the online archive. The chapter argue that the continuing absence from university syllabi, and publishers’ lists, of many of the Irish women ‘discovered’ by digital research projects, indicates that presence is only the first step in securing real engagement with the literary archive of women’s writings. Looking to the future of the feminist digital, and the potential offered by big data, this chapter explores how long-standing digital questions of access, interoperability, and sustainability continue to influence the parameters of the field.

In editing this volume of essays, Technology in Irish Literature and Culture, for the Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture series, we are pleased to accept the dual invitation delivered by series editor Ronan McDonald: in his words, ‘to choose a significant issue that animates or perplexes contemporary Irish culture, and use it as an aperture through which to examine the literature of previous eras’. Our choice of subject is technology, a subject of fundamental significance to our current condition, and central to very many of our contemporary concerns, vexations, pleasures, and opportunities.

This chapter provides a crucial historical perspective on the repeated crises of hunger leading up to the Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Margaret Kelleher argues that “Although the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1851 is the best-known occurrence, the experience of large-scale famine in Ireland was of much longer duration.” Ireland of course had experienced a number of famines (smaller in scale) before the devastation of the 1840s. Kelleher points to “periods of great hardship in 1756–57, 1782–84, 1800–1801, 1816–18, 1822, and 1831,” and relies on the environmental history of the eighteenth century for a longue durée historicization of the Great Hunger.

The 1999 publication of Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (translation, 2004) accorded Ireland and Irish writers an unusually high profile among world literature studies. In chapter 10 of that volume, entitled “The Irish Paradigm,” Casanova foregrounded the achievement of the Irish Literary Revival as what she termed “a compact history of the revolt against the literary order.” This chapter examines the value and limitations of Casanova’s reading as part of a broader examination of the pertinence of terms such as “national,” “international” and “transnational” with respect to Irish writing. It focuses on three case studies: firstly, the historical relationship between Irish fiction and the subject of empire, as exemplified by the work of nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth. Secondly, it examines the work of W.B. Yeats, most famous writer of the Irish Revival, and his critical status as poet of decolonization and exemplar of transnational poetics. Finally, the transnational character of contemporary Irish fiction is discussed, including recent writings by writers Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Mike McCormack and Melatu Uche Okorie.

Our contemporary moment sees a new impetus toward commemoration, fueled by the government-sponsored “Decade of Centenaries” program, spanning the years 1912–1922, from the centenary of the Ulster Covenant to the Irish Civil War. From the diverse cultural initiatives that have resulted to date, an imperative to expose and question what is memorialized, or what has been allowed to be of public matter, is already proving to be the most powerful feature of this commemorative decade. What has also become evident is the importance of new technologies and new modes of communication that look backward and forward: They invite new ways of thinking about the past that are already proving to be transformative in the present. Central to these activities is the development of new audiences and networks for the reception of Irish culture and, as this chapter also demonstrates, many offer the individual artist and their works a newly invigorated public role.

After free secondary-school education became available for all in Ireland, questions as to the outline and content of a literary curriculum at secondary level became relevant to our understanding of how a contemporary generation of Irish writers responded to, and re-engaged with, their own educational background. This chapter initially offers a brief overview of Irish government policy in education before 1940, before discussing the key curricular developments between 1940 and 1980, bringing to light the political and cultural negotiations that determined how English literature was taught in Irish second-level schools. When free second-level education was introduced in Northern Ireland (1947) and in the Republic of Ireland (1967), it amounted to a widening of social access to education that was of huge personal significance to many Irish writers. The second half of this chapter explores the shaping power of the English literature programme for the Irish literary imagination through a study of how a selection of Irish writers who were students of English during these decades depicted their educational formation; this section focusses on writers such as John McGahern, Seamus Deane, and Paula Meehan, amongst others.

Over recent decades, government policy towards the arts in Ireland has awkwardly combined a commitment to expanding arts participation and audience engagement with the support and nurturing of creative talent; or, to put this tension less benignly, a desire for visible, quantifiable ‘output’ versus the inevitably jagged creative trajectories of individuals. This essay explores the discourse and debates concerning the public value of literature, and relatedly the practice of arts funding in Ireland, from 1980 to 2020. It focuses, in particular, on the role of the Arts Council of Ireland and the influence of related initiatives such as the Ireland Chair of Poetry and the Laureate for Irish Fiction over the period. And it examines a fault line of growing significance between public support for the arts as a form of social cohesion and a championing of the artist, or artists’ potential, as a disruptive force.