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.

This brief coda considers the current state of the interdisciplinary field of Irish Studies, showing how literary criticism and pedagogy, in particular, might engage in fresh ways with contemporary conditions. It offers a short history of Irish Studies, situates the field amid current understandings of area studies, identifies possible new scholarly practices, and argues that a renewed Irish Studies, one still focused on the particularities of Irish culture, has much to offer the “global turn” in literary studies.

This chapter surveys the relationship between eighteenth-century Irish studies and Queer studies. It gives an important account of key approaches in Queer studies to eighteenth-century Irish literature and culture, as well as providing an overview of the current methodological debates in queer historiography, more broadly. As well as presenting readers with an ingress into queer Irish eighteenth-century studies, this chapter also intervenes in scholarly debates on how to account for queerness in the past. Focusing on three case studies, the chapter examines manifestations of queerness in the Anglophone long eighteenth century across the prose fiction and poetry of the satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the poet Charles Churchill (1731–1764), and the prolific writer and essayist Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). From reading the erotic parameters of Swift’s Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to Churchill’s anti-Irish figure of the fribble which surfaced during the mid-century’s fraught Seven Years’ War debates, and then later, re-examining Edgeworth’s queer depiction of Harriet Freke in Belinda (1801), this chapter brings into sharp relief the fluid, and often contradictory, ways in which eighteenth-century ideas about Ireland and Irishness served to queer emerging norms of British colonial identity and culture.

Recent levels of scholarly activity suggest that Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke remain the pre-eminent Irish writers of the period 1700–1780. Swift’s works are currently being newly edited under the auspices of Cambridge University Press and a new edition of his Correspondence was completed in 2014. It is timely, therefore, to take stock of how these and other bibliographical and critical resources have altered our approach to Swift. The present chapter conducts this assessment, first by looking at the kind of normative critical approach with which the author was himself furnished when encountering Swift as a student; and subsequently by surveying the areas of biography, Irish studies, and book history in which research activity since 2010 has been intense. The chapter discusses recent critical approaches to Swift, identifying the paradigms which studies of this highly controversial writer create and challenge, asking what it means to read Swift in the twenty-first century.