In this chapter Katherine O’Callaghan highlights the crucial fact that, for many Irish writers of the Irish Revival, the West was a rhetorical construction through-and-through; most of them never had the opportunity to travel there: “For most Irish artists in the first half of the twentieth century, the West of Ireland was a place encountered not through personal visits or deep study, but through the paintings, sketches, and accounts of others.” Her essay begins by noting that “While access to the West had been improved by the extension of the railway – the Achill Sound train station had opened in 1895 – travel to and around the West was still challenging” for most. Annette Hemphill’s little-known diary, written in 1906 but published only in 1991 as Rambles of Four in Western Mayo, sets a poignant ethnographic tone in this essay that stretches from John Millington Synge and James Joyce to Daryll Figgis’s Children of the Earth, published in 1918, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, published in 1949.

Belfast as a literary subject is absent from the key texts of Irish modernism written in the early twentieth century, when Belfast was a major industrial city renowned for its shipbuilding. This chapter examines works by the few writers who wrote of the industrial city with its numerous working class that had built the Titanic: Richard Rowley, Sean O’Faolain, and Louis MacNeice, the latter two of whom excoriated the city. Even Joyce, who understood that Dublin was a quintessential modern city in Ulysses, ignored the city to its north, while Samuel Beckett in his novel Murphy, a work focused on London (that sought to do for London what Joyce had done for Dublin), chose to deal with industrial modernity only in a satiric and dismissive fashion.