Censorship affected the careers of many Irish writers and transformed the trajectory of modern Irish literature. Although some authors were reluctant to defend themselves and their art, others strenuously fought against the curtailment of freedom of expression by lobbying politicians, writing polemics, and organising themselves into professional bodies and activist groups. Supported by archival research and informed by philosophical concerns, Censorship and the Irish Writer details almost a century of this history from an innovative perspective. Discussing writers such as AE, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Sean O’Casey, Sean O’Faolain, Bernard Shaw, and W.B. Yeats and writers’ organisations like the Irish Academy of Letters and Irish PEN, Brad Kent offers vital insight into the intersections of politics, art, and resistance.

While this book recounts spectacular controversies, it places such events in a long line of agitations for greater freedom of expression and in the context of personal lives and professional networks that straddled geopolitical borders. In so doing, Kent argues that censorship is a phenomenon that is driven by tensions not only between the competing rights of individuals and the wider community, but between the national and the international, the local and the global. The result is an original and compelling account of Irish literary history.

In recounting the fascinating history of how modern Irish writers politically, socially, and polemically organised against censorship, this book examines the ways in which freedom of expression has been defended, debated, and resisted in Britain and Ireland.“This is the book for which everyone concerned with the material conditions of Irish culture has been waiting. We have long understood, if only anecdotally, that censorship was instrumental in determining the direction of Irish writing for much of the twentieth century. With Brad Kent's superbly researched new book, we now understand why and how. This is scholarship that will endure.”

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Contours of Censorship, Politics, Polemics, and the International Dialectic

Chapter One: Setting the Template: George Moore and the Public Face of Resistance

Chapter Two: Evolving Tactics: Bernard Shaw, Relentless Antagonism, and Organised Resistance

Chapter Three: The Scene Shifts to Ireland: James Joyce, Brinsley MacNamara, and Lennox Robinson

Chapter Four: A Made-in-Ireland Censorship: Polemics and Institutional Formation

Chapter Five: A Made-in-Ireland Resistance: The Rise and Fall of the Irish Academy of Letters

Chapter Six: International Networking: Establishing Irish PEN

Chapter Seven: Insularity and Reform: Irish PEN in the War Years

Chapter Eight: Equivocal Values: Irish PEN in the Age of Appeal

Chapter Nine: Aligning with Other Intellectuals: The Irish Association for Civil Liberty and Conservative Ireland’s Last Great Censorship Moral Panic

Chapter Ten: Towards the Liberalisation of Censorship: John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, and the Censorship Reform Society

Coda

Appendix: Table of Books by Irish Writers Banned in Ireland

Notes

Bibliography

Index

“In this highly valuable and timely study of censorship as an international dialectic, Brad Kent newly illuminates the experiences of censorship for Irish writers over a century of conflict and resistance. As he persuasively argues, this is a history best understood not merely as local battles or a national story but as part of a global movement for artistic integrity and freedom of expression.”