Art and Affiliation:
Tracing Twentieth-century Irish Countercultures

In the aftermath of devastating wars and social upheaval, while grappling with the threat of economic collapse, twentieth-century Irish governments jettisoned the radical promise held out by the revolutionary generation. As two states came into being on the island of Ireland, both proved repressive and socially conservative; the new futures imagined by activists and artists who strove for sovereign independence and a redefinition of the social contract were sidelined.

During the decade of centenaries, scholars began to reevaluate the generative power of those diverse countercultural groups and activist formations available to early twentieth-century revolutionaries. Extending this, my research opens up the character and importance of radical affiliation in the period. In a small country, the lives and experience of key figures involved in Irish arts and activism are closely intertwined but the concept of community in creating dissident art is often ignored. I show that affiliation to countercultural groupings enabled creatives to survive the dominant culture in twentieth-century Ireland.  By redefining the circle surrounding Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, for instance, I enliven a mutually supportive network creating capacity for artistic production and ideological intervention. Moreover, for those revolutionaries who now found themselves living and working in a theocratic Irish state, the development of counterpublics provided a collective space within which to move freely and to separate out (however briefly) from dominant modes of domestic and national identities.

Turning to the literature, I trace such radical affiliation across the writing of three Irish women artists, Rosamond Jacob, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate O’Brien. Their fiction and personal writing redrafts the social contract, focusing on sexual dissidence and returning insistently to question how intimate, familial, and national bonds are forged, and why. I contend that the challenge to conventional modes of love and domesticity, in their personal and literary writing, underlines the crucial importance of lateral support networks in the period. The alternatives they propose to hierarchical family and state structures, I argue, unsettle fixities of family and national affinity in the aftermath of the revolution.