The Aura of the Irish Book: The Cuala and Dolmen Presses

Abstract

Irish printing in the early years of the Celtic Revival had fallen into disarray, and as a response to this circumstance, Elizabeth Yeats and her brother W.B. Yeats inaugurated a new era of Irish printing with the creation of the Cuala Press. This study seeks to situate the production of this distinctively Irish nationalist press in relation to the reified social relations encoded in the materiality of books produced in England. The distinction between the Irish private press movement and the commercially produced books of England emphasizes the forms colonial resistance embedded in the materiality of the Cuala books. Furthermore, the Dolmen Press, an Irish private press founded five years after the closing of the Cuala in 1946, continues the tradition of Irish press production through its material and linguistic dialogue with colonial representation and the formation of an Irish identity in an international context.