In Edna Longley’s essay “Irish Bards and American Audiences,” she claims that the long-term consequences of the Irish Revival have meant that Americans have set up a “global fan-club” for Irish literature, which risks homogenizing and sanitizing Ireland’s literary output, and leads to a reciprocal state of “Hiberno-American blandness.” Yet, since Longley published her essay two decades ago, there have been continual reevaluations of “Irish” and “Irish-American” literary identities. This chapter considers how far Irish(-American) writers still risk perpetuating what Diane Negra, in The Irish in US (2006), has described as a “theme park” idealization of Irish culture. What does this mean for writers whose work alternatively courts, or avoids, clichés of nostalgia, immigration, and transatlantic travel? What are the cultural consequences of the “blandness” Longley describes? The chapter covers writing by Irish and Irish-American filmmakers, novelists, and dramatists from the past twenty years – including Sally Rooney, Colm Tóibín, Martin McDonagh, and John Patrick Shanley – to consider how such works negotiate the delicate balance between cultural credibility and artistic independence.

This contribution focuses on early modern refugee artisans, and their families, who engaged actively with print culture while cobbling together spiritual ideas, natural philosophies, local scientific knowledge, and dexterous craft skills during the earliest years of the industrial revolution. It provides a “deep” history of the little-known entrepreneur Jacques Fontaine (1658–1728), a Huguenot refugee. Together with his wife and sister-in-law, Fontaine invented a small fire machine to produce a cheap imitation-silk finish on a common woolen textile. Fontaine’s experiences working with this commodity embody the crucial strategy of the so-called New Luxuries. This beacme a mainstay of the vast majority of highly skilled refugee Huguenot artisans scattered throughout the Atlantic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), who elevated local materials of little intrinsic worth to successfully imitate more desirable, expensive, and polite imported goods of greater intrinsic value, while jumpstarting the early industrial and consumer revolutions.