This chapter surveys how Irish titles singled out for reprinting by the British firm Penguin were presented in terms of the materiality of the book as an object, and particularly in the paratextual zones of their editions. It discusses how writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, Joyce Cary, Elizabeth Bowen and Seán O’Faoláin were reprinted, branded and circulated by the British firm Penguin, drawing on Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext as denoting the threshold area or gateway to the text, which comprises elements like cover art, blurbs, laudatory quotations reprinted on covers or endpapers, and editorial introductions. It then offers a case study of one major Irish writer, the novelist Kate O’Brien, and explores how her novels were packaged and marketed within the Penguin and wider reprints milieu. The conclusion juxtaposes the publication of Irish writing by a London-based mass-market concern like Penguin with the activities of the Dolmen Press in Ireland. This native Dublin-based publishing house was modest in comparison to major British commercial presses, but would nonetheless evolve into an important force in the construction of an Irish literary culture in this period in its conscious definition of itself in opposition to international mass-market entities like Penguin.

This chapter reflects on the implications of censorship for writers working after 1940, first, by questioning the extent to which its imposition hampered the expression of a modern literary generation, and second, by exploring the strategies through which it was sidestepped and transgressed by both writers and readers in this period. It considers both the cultural implications of domestic censorship for Irish writers between 1940 and 1980, and the means that existed for circumventing the policing of ‘foreign’ literature. It highlights the pervasive effects of censorship across the middle decades of the century. First, the focus is on Kate O’Brien, Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, all born before independence, who found themselves directly at odds with the country they had seen created. Faced with the banning of their own books, they battled to resist official strictures of their work. It then considers a subsequent generation of writers – including Edna O’Brien, Leland Bardwell, John Montague, John McGahern and Julia O’Faoláin – born during a period in which censorship had already become embedded within Irish literary culture. Finally, this chapter concludes by examining the experience of Colm Tóibín, who grew up in the 1950s, when censorship was still a dominant force.

This chapter examines the way in which Irish writing throughout the middle decades of the century negotiated a national identity in tension with a European sensibility. The Continental dimensions of many key Irish texts, such as Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), or the European locations of Irish émigré writers such as Samuel Beckett and Thomas McGreevy, need to be expanded into a full account of the country’s brokerage of European ideas, philosophies and intellectual stimuli. The Ireland that ‘froze for want of Europe’, in Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 ‘Lough Derg’, emerged over these decades towards integration of various kinds, as reflected consistently in the work of writers such as Hubert Butler. In 1973, Ireland’s accession to membership of the European Economic Community marked a stepping stone in diplomatic and trade relations; how, in turn, does the writing examined in this chapter support the concept of the ‘Irish European’, and what implications does this have for outlines of a ‘national’ literary tradition?