HEIndividual fellowship2022–2024

IWandTNYinMID20thC · Middlebrow Modernity: Irish Writers and The New Yorker in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration: 2022-10-01 → 2024-09-30
EU contribution: €175,920
Participants: 2
Scheme: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Results in brief

Middlebrow Modernity: Irish Writers and The New Yorker in the Mid-Twentieth Century

The main objective of the project to provide a cultural history of Irish writers' connections with The New Yorker in the mid-twentieth century. I will first conduct a comprehensive survey of Irish writers' contributions in The New Yorker from 1940 to 1980. Based on this survey, I will offer fresh readings of the Irish stories within the publishing context of the magazine. This close reading will be guided by the methodologies of periodical studies, the new modernist studies, and middlebrow culture studies. In addition, I will conduct archival research to look at contracts, payments, and editorial letters to establish the financial and editorial relationships between the Irish writers and The New Yorker. Telling the cultural history of Irish writers' connections with one of the most important American magazines, this project will contribute to a better understanding of the transatlantic dimension of Irish literary production in the mid-twentieth century. This understanding will in turn provide an important historical account to position Irish literature in the global literary marketplace from the twentieth century to our present time.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

This project explores Irish writers’ connections with The New Yorker, shedding new light on the literary transactions between the US and Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. I investigate how Irish writers engaged with the American metropolitan magazine’s post-war liberalism; I also consider the extent to which the connection with TNY can help us redefine Ireland’s “isolated” literary environment in relation to global modernity.Many important Irish writers contributed regularly to TNY. While it is well known that the magazine enhanced Irish writers’ international standings, some critics have voiced concerns that the magazine’s scrupulous editorial process limited the writers’ experimentalism and capitalized upon their stories’ Irishness in order to appeal to a largely American readership. This criticism, however, risks overstating the popular magazine’s supposed “conservatism.” As a middlebrow publication that aimed to inform and entertain at the same time, TNY navigated the liminal—yet richly evocative—space between highbrow culture and lowbrow humour, revealing an ambivalent attitude towards both radical reforms and middleclass complacency. Drawing on periodical studies and theories of middlebrow culture to establish my theoretical framework, I consider this metropolitan magazine’s fraught relationships with the experimental arts and its intimate involvement in the experience of modernity. I argue that it was not TNY’s “conservatism,” but its ambivalences towards modernity that resonated with mid-twentieth-century Irish writers. Re-inserting the fictional works of the Irish writers into the textual space of TNY—alongside the cartoons, advertisements, and journalistic reports—this project advances our understanding of the Irish short story in relation to metropolitan and transatlantic modernity. It offers the first fully contextualized literary–biographical account of the relationships between the TNY editors, the Irish writers, and their American peers.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN · LeuvenCoordinatorBelgium
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY · NEW YORKUnited States

IWandTNYinMID20thC · Middlebrow Modernity: Irish Writers and The New Yorker in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Results in brief

Middlebrow Modernity: Irish Writers and The New Yorker in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Project objective

Participants

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