Subject: Dublin in the rare ould days
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sun Mar 26 2000 - 17:16:03 EST
Paul writes:
'... the assumption ... That the city that gave us Joyce, Yeats,
Synge et. al. in the early years of the century could in any way
be considered a literary backwater by 1951....'
You must remember that the Dublin of the 40s & 50s was stifling
under an unimaginable combination of Catholic & nationalistic
bigotry grown rank in the isolation of neutrality during the Second
World War & the depression of the Economic War with Britain
in the years immediately before that. You would have difficulty
thinking of any modern writer worth a damn who was not
forbidden by the Irish Censorship. (Including, naturally, all
the good native ones from Joyce himself through Frank O'Connor
to Liam O'Flaherty.) It led to a vigorous black market in banned
books that may well have produced, of course, the very opposite
effect of that intended by Dr John Charles McQuaid (usually referred
to as the Archbigot of Dublin). Nonetheless, we felt ourselves under
a kind of seige looking out rather desperately from the battlements
for signals from the outside world.
Scottie B.
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