Irish Literary Magazines ― An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography

Every significant Irish writer, from Swift to Heaney, and including Ferguson, Yeats, Kavanagh, Hewitt, and many more, has been intimately involved in Irish literary magazines, as contributor, reviewer or editor. These magazines provided successive generations of writers and artists with their village square, club and debating society rolled into one, and help us to chart the significance of the multifarious literary inter-relationships, and of the writers' interaction with their own times. This is the first comprehensive guide to almost three hundred years of Irish literary magazines - an important, but neglected resource for those interested in a number of areas of Irish Studies, including literature, and literary, social, cultural and economic history. In two parts, it firstly summarises the use which has been made of this material to date, and then outlines the history of these magazines, their development, personalities, and major themes and formats. There follows a descriptive bibliographical listing of well over two hundred Irish literary magazines giving the basic bibliographical details, summaries of each title, its contents and importance. There are also a number of distribution maps and chronological charts. No serious study of any Irish writer is complete without an examination of this vital context to their life and work.