This exhaustively researched and invaluable book offers the first comprehensive account of the Gaelic literary movement during the two decades following Irish independence. Taking up where Philip O’Leary's The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (1994) left off, this volume examines the prose produced by those who sought to build on the empowerment of a native government by reviving Irish throughout society and creating a viable literature in Irish. In the former goal, the activists were, as we know, unsuccessful. Anglicization increased throughout the period despite their alarmed protests. But in the more modest, yet still substantial, latter goal, the activists were remarkably successful indeed, particularly when measured against the considerable difficulties they faced. This book gives us a careful assessment of that very real success, without denying its shortcomings.

The scholarly research that has gone into this book can only be called heroic. O’Leary has done painstaking original investigation into manuscripts and collected papers of the period. He has consulted, by my count, some 156 periodicals, including regional newspapers, journals and magazines, and student publications from secondary schools and universities, as well as a great number of pamphlets and books, including considerable rare, ephemeral, and out-of-print material of idiosyncratic spelling and usage. He also cites and evaluates contemporary scholarship in Irish and English. He quotes copiously, giving accurate, idiomatic translations as needed, from this vast and heterogeneous archive, presenting the Irish originals in the voluminous, annotated footnotes so that interested readers may examine or quote the originals themselves. There is, moreover, a user-friendly index and a helpful biographical guide to his many unfamiliar protagonists. This authoritative and generous book not only recognizes its responsibilities as a groundbreaking study, it exceeds them.

An introductory chapter orients us to the new linguistic circumstances under the Irish Free State from 1922 and the short but nasty civil war that followed. Amid much partisan distrust, a sympathetic government populated by numerous movement adherents instituted Irish instruction across the national schools, helped fund many literary and dramatic endeavors, and established a state publishing agency in 1926, producing more books in Irish than ever before. Yet old issues persisted: dialect rivalry, disputes over fonts and orthography, competition between native speakers and learners, an obsession with linguistic purity, and nativist ideology. Fundamental questions loomed. What could and should be written in Irish? How would the language be transformed to address modern topics? Who would write it? Who would read it? Could writers in Irish make a living? Literature was more valued as ideal than practice, for it was expected to serve not art, but native pride, language rescue, and pedagogy, especially for the young. For the author-activist, therefore, “literature was not … a solitary pursuit of truth, but … a team sport” in pursuit of “the goal of a Gaelic nation once again.” This only aggravated the challenges “faced by the author of any minority language in a bilingual society in which the lion's share of the prestige and profit accrue to the rival tongue” (10).

O’Leary investigates key literary and linguistic debates of the period, such as the opposition to the pagan, decadent forces of Anglicization (read: secularism, immorality, materialism, and jazz) and the infuriating popular desire to substitute mere “Gaelachas na gCos” (Gaelicness of the feet—i.e., dancing) for rigorous language study. He considers how the enduring idealization of rural life hampered artistic creativity and breadth. He surveys exciting new directions in Gaelic prose, including futurist writing, critiques of capitalism and urban life, and sympathetic treatments of prostitution and unwed motherhood. For instance, the 1932 novel by Úna Bean Uí Dhíosca (Mrs. Elizabeth Dix), Cailín na Gruaige Duinne (The brown-haired girl), featured pacifist politics, protofeminism, and marital breakdown—a revelation in Irish women's writing in either language.

The Gaelic writer's relationship to the Irish past and to the heroic tradition is investigated and usefully contrasted with that of the contemporaneous Anglophone writer. O’Leary gives a timely reevaluation of the policy of translation, so central to the production of Irish prose in quantity, if not quality, by An Gúm, the governmental publishing scheme. Another chapter explores the antagonistic and defensive attitude of many Gaelic activists toward Irish literature in English. The movement to spread Gaelic drama is described and quantified, illustrating major successes in spreading youth drama festivals nationally and in developing a modest yet significant audience for more mature Gaelic productions despite amateur acting and a lack of good plays. When O’Leary takes final stock, we must agree with him that the language had made an impressive journey over the years of his study, as marked by the 1939 reestablishment of the Oireachtas, still the most important competitive forum for new writing in Irish, and the publication that same year of two subtle and sophisticated books demonstrating the new force and capability of Irish as a literary medium: Dublin learner, critic, and Free State bureaucrat Liam Ó Rinn's memoir of his friendship with classicist Stephen McKenna and the first book of short stories by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, a Conamara native speaker and Republican now considered one of the finest Irish writers of the twentieth century.

This book proffers a wealth of heretofore inaccessible information, including titles, plot details, and statistics about these often obscure texts, with translations that make them available to scholars without Irish. Judicious general overviews and deft footnotes help the reader navigate in unfamiliar territory. While not slow to characterize his texts, O’Leary tends to inform and elucidate rather than offer a final judgment on the vast number of works at his disposal. This modest approach does not disguise the radical challenge this book poses to Irish-language scholars to investigate this newly visible, thematically organized, and well-indexed corpus. Indeed, shouldn’t some of these works be reprinted? And what about an anthology of representative and unusual short works from hard-to-find periodical and rare book holdings? In the meantime, scholars of twentieth-century Ireland and its literature will be keen to examine the riches of this pioneering, authoritative work.