The Oxford History of the Irish Book is a major series that charts one of the most venerable book cultures in Europe, from the earliest manuscript compilations to the flourishing book industries of the late twentieth century. For the first time, it offers a history of the Irish book as a created object situated in a world of communications, trade, transport, power, and money, and examines the ways in which books have both reflected and influenced social, political, and intellectual formations in Ireland. It is an important project for the understanding of Ireland's written and printed heritage, and is by its nature of profound cross-cultural significance, embracing as it does all the written and printed traditions and heritages of Ireland and placing them in the global context of a worldwide interest in book histories.
Volume II, with eighty-two chapters by seventy leading commentators on, and participants in, Irish book history, spans approximately 450 years of Irish-language book production, distribution, and reception. It begins with the 1567 publication of John Carswell's Gaelic version of the Book of Common Order and follows the story of the printed book and journalism in Irish into the twenty-first century, the internet, ebooks, and other formats.
The volume covers religious publications from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, competing versions of Irish history, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts which reflected an 'antiquarian' interest in Ireland and its culture, ongoing literary production in the nineteenth century, printers, publishers, literacy, books, and volumes produced by learned societies interested in Irish language and culture, Gaelic Revival publications, post-Independence literature and its publishers, journalism from the late eighteenth to twenty-first century, lexicography, nonfiction, educational publishing, folklore and place lore, translation, the contribution of scholars from outside Ireland, publishing in the Irish diaspora, typography, book design and illustration, the reception of Irish-language texts (from censorship to bestsellers), book collection, and, finally, sources for the study of Irish book history.
This major study of Irish-language book history provides a useful resource for readers interested in Irish history, book history, Irish Studies, the Irish language, Celtic Studies, Translation Studies, linguistics, post-colonialism, and the Irish diaspora.
