Ireland’s West and the English Left

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter explores the engagement of Ireland within England’s interwar socialist imaginary. It assesses writing from 1930s and 1940s British intellectuals geared to left-wing or communist utopianism and persuaded by concepts of Irish culture as a preserved repository of classical ideals. One of these, English Marxist George Thomson, made a long-term investment in Ireland’s west coast during the interwar decades, and subsequently engaged the perceived pre-capitalist idyll of the Blasket Islands as a wellspring for the socialist polemic of his book, Marxism and Poetry. Political events in Europe during the 1930s meanwhile, encouraged a triangular relationship, for many idealist intellectuals, between the ongoing convulsions of the Civil War in Spain, the ideological flux of a volatile England, and an Ireland still carrying revolutionary legacies, a complex backdrop that informs the Irish-set middlebrow romance and satirical fiction of the author Ethel Mannin.