Damien Keane, following his work on mediation and radio in Ireland and the Problem of Information, examines a series of instituted practices that exist in proximate relation to those of the more conventionally construed literary field by tracing the conjunction of folklore collecting, news gathering, and radio broadcasting on the occasion of the return of W.B. Yeats’s remains to Sligo in 1948. This convergence was enabled by the mobile recording units Radio Éireann had begun deploying around the island during the previous year, initially as a new mode of collecting material among scattered Irish-speaking communities and now increasingly as part of the service’s enlarged News Department. As Keane questions, could we consider this occasion a literary event? Against the subsequent canonization of Yeats’s poetic voice, his paper will argue that, as a radio event, the re-interment of Yeats’s bones emblematizes the tensions that define the literary field.

Turning from the literary event of the recorded word to the written and illustrated word, Kaitlin Thurlow’s paper focuses on the ecosystems of fine press edition collaborations between Irish writers. Since the 1970s, authors such as Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, Eavan Boland and Michael Longley have partnered with artists and publishers to produce fine press editions of their work. As a culmination of a mature phase of their productive output, these creative projects offer insight into the writer’s process. Through transatlantic exchanges, the publisher, poet, and artists’ in-progress correspondences dissolve borders and boundaries of artistic autonomy. Juxtaposing these projects against authoritative collections published by a literary or trade press, Thurlow suggests that these collaborations provide insight in the creative practices of these writers.

Speaking to the contemporary literary marketplace, Dîlara Yilmaz will offer a materialist analysis of why contemporary Irish writers–most notably Sally Rooney but also Naoise Dolan and Nicole Flattery–have gained such international recognition and academic attention. She argues that Ireland’s robust literary infrastructure enabled a phenomenon like Rooney and situates this particularly female surge within the fabric of Ireland’s creative economy, which has institutionalized creative writing, and whose financial commitment, fuelled by state funding and exports, distinguishes it. Yilmaz emphasizes how Ireland’s monetary practices promote authors, and how its Arts Council engages in all fields (including production, reception, circulation) and forms a distinct pen-to-publication pipeline. She will present unique interview data featuring interviews with Irish writers, editors, directors of public institutions, and agents. Using post-Bourdieusian approaches, she reconciles institutional, economic and social conditions of writing to assess Irish writers’ position in growing local and global literary economies.

All three papers, delivered by an international selection of scholars at various career stages, share a commitment to reconceptualizing the methodologies used in Irish studies and literary studies more broadly conceived through their attention to the material conditions of literary production, dissemination, and institutionalized practices. Moving from the canonization of Yeats through the radio event of his reinterment, to the collaborations between publishers, visual artists, and poets in the 1970s, to how Ireland’s national support of writers form a pen-to-publication pipeline, these papers expose the complex institutional infrastructures that shape literary productions and receptions.