Fleming, Will; (2024) Green, green, a saleable country, the very colour of money: small-press poetry in Ireland from modernisation to the Celtic Tiger. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

By the middle of the twentieth century, the still fledgling Irish Republic was economically stagnant: largely untouched by industrialisation, reliant on agriculture, and insulated from the wider world through a policy of protectionism. However, in the late 1950s, it embarked upon a project of economic modernisation, an experiment which would irrevocably alter the social and cultural fabric of the state over the intervening sixty years. The contemporary consensus is that this has been the making of modern Ireland: a hegemonic success story of steady growth and stable progress towards economic prosperity, immortalised in today’s history books. This thesis, by contrast, seeks to contribute a more nuanced, unvarnished account of Ireland’s transformation since modernisation, as it is told in the pages of another kind of book: the small-press poetry collection. In weighing social commentaries conveyed in the experimental work of an Irish small-press poetic tradition since the 1960s against canonical versions of Ireland’s narrative of progress, it strives to reclaim from the margins of cultural production a more dynamic picture of the state’s political and social contexts in this period. The objective is therefore twofold: to construct a counter history of modern Ireland by recentring within Irish literary discourse a largely overlooked yet vital avant-garde poetic tradition. It unfolds chronologically, in three parts which correspond to the three major eras in the economic history of modern Ireland: modernisation (1958–86), financialisation (1987–1993), and the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath (1994–2022). Across its five chapters, it foregrounds five major concepts relevant to Ireland’s social and economic makeup during these different eras: nationalism, neoliberalism, financialisation, feminism, and the so-called knowledge economy. Through analysing the spectre of such concepts in small-press works by Trevor Joyce, Thomas Kinsella, David Lloyd, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, and Ellen Dillon, this thesis exemplifies the extent to which such poetry simultaneously registers both the impress and a critique of the social and political conditions in which it was produced.

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