This chapter examines the growth of small-press publishing in Ireland during the 2010s and early 2020s. It contextualizes the Irish small-press industry within three broad trends: 1) the global expansion of nonprofit small-press publishing from the 1980s to the present; 2) the Irish state’s financing of literary infrastructure (mostly in the form of strategic funding grants disbursed by the Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon); and 3) the development of rights-sharing agreements between small-press publishers, such that several different small presses will release the same title simultaneously (or in near succession) in different countries. In mapping this global publishing system, the chapter shows how the much-lauded “golden age” of post-crash Irish fiction can be traced to market and institutional dynamics. Specifically, it describes how the consolidation of the international small-press industry has exerted a discernable influence on the aesthetics of contemporary Irish literature, with Irish literature evolving into a field in which certain international styles popular with Anglo-American small presses are cited, borrowed from, reworked, and made into something new.

Can formal innovation make a direct contribution to the affective power of prose fiction? Do the kinds of linguistic deformation characteristic of a certain strand of modernism lend themselves to the depiction, and evocation in the reader, of emotion? These questions are raised with particular force by a number of recent Irish novels, which can be seen as taking up the challenge posed by Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Three such novels are the focus of this essay: Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone, and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. Short passages are discussed in order to demonstrate that the innovative linguistic devices in these novels – McBride’s fragmented stream-of-consciousness tracing of the traumatic events in a young woman’s life, Barry’s comic invention of an episode in John Lennon’s career, and McCormack’s unpunctuated, spatially arranged meditation – all enhance rather than reduce their emotional impact.