This chapter focusses on developments in Irish-language prose, drawing attention to innovation in subject matter, literary form and language, and also the persistent and deep-seated anxieties which writers such as Máirtín Ó Cadhain voiced about the future of the Irish language as a creative medium. This chapter considers the context and impact of the language question on Irish-language writing at this time, also examining the emergence of Irish periodicals and independent publishing companies. Ó Cadhain was a particularly prolific publisher in both of these formats, with his 1949 novel Cré na Cille standing out in particular as one of the few internally acclaimed modernist texts that emerged in this era. However, Ó Cadhain was not the only avant-garde writer in Irish, and this chapter also discusses some of the most innovative prose writing to emerge in these decades by non-native speakers of Irish Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin, Breandán Ó Doibhlin and Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, whose work was collectively characterised by critic Lydia Groszewski as ‘Turgnamhacht na Tríonóide’ (The Experimentalism of the Trinity). It then discusses a generation of new Gaeltacht authors like Siobhán Ní Shúilleabháin, who broke new ground in this period, particularly in their depiction of the social aspirations of young rural women.

More than sixty years after its initial publication in Irish, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s epic novel Cré na Cille appeared in an English translation: two of them, in fact – each published within a year of the other and by the same publisher, Yale University Press. This chapter takes this unusual circumstance as a stimulus to investigate the wider literary landscape and to give a nuanced overview of pertinent issues and emerging trends in Irish-language literature. Special attention is given to the role of translation, both to and from Irish, in the publication, mediation, and reception of Irish-language literature. Although much is often made of the literary afterlives of Irish-language texts in English, the author contends that these issues are best examined and understood in a multilingual context.

This chapter reconsiders the cultural condition of 1940s Ireland in the context of wartime neutrality, exploring the literary response to the hostilities in Ireland itself, north and south, and the complex positioning of the writers involved who treated its effects on a domestic landscape, including Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Benedict Kiely. How did Irish writers respond to the aftermath of the Second World War and, in particular, the filtering of information about the Holocaust? The Irish author and playwright Denis Johnston, a BBC correspondent in the Middle East for much of the conflict, represents one of those with direct experience of the action and its diplomatic fallout. This chapter challenges a historical acceptance that Ireland became increasingly insular and detached as a result of its wartime political neutrality, and identifies instead a set of important literary engagements driven by the wider horizon of the conflict.