Ireland & Print Culture

ADVERTISING, LITERATURE and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922 is a rich and entertaining study. At the start of the book, John Strachan and Claire Nally assert the significance of the work: “the first book in Irish studies to pay close attention to the cultural meanings of advertising during the Revival era.” They do not disappoint. Written in lively prose, illustrated with remarkable examples of late nineteenth-early twentieth-century advertising, and covering a wide swath of Revival culture, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in Irish studies, modernist studies, and print and media history.

The Irish or Celtic Revival taking place in the period covered by Strachan and Nally was a deliberate attempt to foreground “Irish Ireland,” Irish culture, literature, and traditional arts. It is often cast as a complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, a resistance to modernization as it was playing out through the capitalist and colonialist relationship to the British Empire. Emer Nolan in her essay “Modernism and the Irish Revival” has characterized it as a “modernist movement in a colonial setting” (Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, 2005, 157), caught as it was, like other forms of modernism, in a matrix of high art and folkways drawing its energy from an anxiety over mass commodity culture. Key figures such as Yeats engaged in Revival culture through poetry, myth and folklore, as well as participating in artisanal endeavors like Dun Emer and Cuala Press. On the other hand, Joyce notoriously rejected Revival culture and its writers like Yeats and AE for a more cosmopolitan modernism.

Strachan, a scholar of advertising in the Romantic period, and Nally, an expert on Yeats, note that much of the work that has been done on advertising and commodity culture focuses on just this dichotomy: the rejection of mass commercialism versus the impulse to play with the flotsam and jetsam of modernity in the form of Tit-Bits and advertisements for Sandow’s exercises (both appearing at different points during Leopold Bloom’s day in Ulysses). Joyce studies in particular has given us robust readings of late nineteenth-early twentieth-century advertising and literary culture, most notably Jennifer Wicke’s Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (1988) and Garry Leonard’s Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (1998). Victorian studies has also benefited from a number of recent publications considering advertising and print culture and their impact on literary form. With the publication of Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922, a wider context for these debates and trends is made available to scholars, showing the complexity of Revival culture as both a political and an aesthetic movement and opening the way to new scholarship. This is a sophisticated, important reframing of the Revival in its exploration of the relationship between art and commerce, and the implications for a new vision of an emergent national identity grappling with modernity.

The contents are framed by broad examinations of the time leading up to the Great War and then to the founding of the Free State in 1922. The choice of dates is significant: Part I begins with the aftereffects of the Great Famine, and Part IV ends with the creation of the Saorstát, and both events are often cited as watershed moments ushering Ireland into modernity. In between, Strachan and Nally delve into case studies in Part II, aspects of Irish Revival culture hitherto under researched in the context of commodity culture, and they look at how their representation in advertisements shaped readings of Irish identity, nationalist and unionist movements, gender and constructions of Irish womanhood, and sport as nationalism. Fixtures of Revival culture are then in Part III placed against “‘High’ Culture,” in the figures of Wilde and Yeats, in order to show the productive relationship between high and mass culture. Even as they made vigorous claims for art and aestheticism as responses against encroaching commercialism, Wilde and Yeats used advertising to fashion both artistic selves and a place in national culture.

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