To say that Ireland has “imagined” Europe is to acknowledge a long history of looking outward in order to look inward. Across the twentieth century, Irish writers repeatedly used European scenes, debates, and crises as sounding boards for local anxieties about nationhood, faith and secularity, gender, class, and the ethics of belonging. Europe, in this sense, is not merely a map of proximate states but a repertoire of figures – Catholic and secular modernities, revolutionary and reactionary energies, borderlands and capitals – through which Irish authors tested their own aesthetic and political commitments, and these exchanges were anchored in uneven yet persistent cultural corridors. One of the aims of this special issue is literary: to trace how texts staged “Europe” as a scene of recognition and estrangement, a foil and a mirror, and to sketch some lines of continuity that make the special issue’s case studies legible as parts of a wider conversation. A simple claim frames what follows. Irish writing has persistently turned to Europe not to flee “Irishness”, but to re-articulate it. The best work in this idiom refuses binary oppositions – Ireland versus Europe; Revivalism versus Modernism; faith versus critique, and instead reads for contact, translation, and the ethics of comparison. That orientation runs from the 1930s travelogues of Walter Starkie, Kate O’Brien or Mairin Mitchell, among others, through the moral essays of Hubert Butler, to post-conflict fictions that refract Ireland’s own silences through other European landscapes. It also runs through gendered imaginaries of “Catholic Europe” in which Spain, for example, becomes a charged screen for thinking the politics of womanhood at home and abroad. Europe, in short, is the test ground where Irish writing rehearsed (and sometimes resisted) its own becoming European.

Two critical lenses help: imagology and transnational form. Imagology, in Joep Leerssen’s classic sense, studies how literatures construct images of other peoples and places – not as innocent descriptions, but as culturally useful representations that travel, sediment, and acquire authority (Leerssen 2007). For Irish writers, “Europe” often functions imagologically, a composite heuristic that is Catholic and secular, metropolitan and provincial, deeply historical yet insistently modern. Transnational form, meanwhile, stresses that literary shapes (novel, travelogue, essay) are themselves technologies for moving across borders. Form is not a neutral vessel, but it selects and filters what “Europe” can be on the page. The 1930s are instructive here because formal debates about Irish poetry and prose dovetail with questions of continental allegiance. In “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934) – published under a pseudonym – Samuel Beckett stages a polemical divide between “antiquarians” and “others”, a shorthand for the friction between Revivalist pieties and experimental modernisms. The essay caused a storm in literary Dublin, not least because it read the Irish field against European manifestos that had already made the newness of modernism into a programme (Belis 1934: 235-36; Brown 2010: 91). As Alex Davis and Lee Jenkins later argued, Beckett’s piece was a “strategic intervention” in Irish poetics, aligning certain possibilities for Irish writing with transnational modes of innovation (Davis and Jenkins 2000: 143). But even within this familiar story, the margins misbehave. Gráinne Condon’s essay in this issue re-centres Blanaid Salkeld, tracing her connections with Beckett to show how a woman poet occluded in standard accounts both inhabits and troubles the strictures of that debate.

If Beckett spotlights form, travel writing from the same decade foregrounds scene: Europe as lived itinerary and ethical problem. The Spanish Civil War drew Irish writers for obvious reasons (ideological, religious, and experiential) and their books became laboratories for negotiating the “European question” at home. Yet travel writing also shows how an imagological Europe can be internally plural. As Martin Tyrrell notes of Kate O’Brien and Mairin Mitchell, both writers are critically “European in focus”, resisting insularity without disavowing an Irish vantage; Catholic Europe, in particular, affords a frame through which they can be “both Irish and outward looking, national but not parochial”. That double hinge of outward gaze and inward argument structures much of what follows. There is a larger lesson here for how literary texts in this field do intellectual work. They are not simply records of encounter; they are instruments of thought. Precisely because Butler refuses the comfort of Irish exceptionalism, his prose paints Europe as a field of near examples that shame local complacency. Respectability, he insists, is not innocent; it launders violence. That claim, born of a European itinerary, re-enters Irish public arguments with sharpened teeth.

Spain occupies a prominent place in the Irish literary imagination of Europe, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The reasons are historical, because of their shared Catholic affiliations, the Civil War’s stark moral theatre, a lively network of Irish Hispanists, and imagological: “Spain” could be made to stand for intensities (faith, passion, tragedy) that Ireland both recognised and feared. Kate O’Brien’s Farewell Spain (1937) and Mairin Mitchell’s Storm over Spain (1937) are touchstones. They are not interchangeable – O’Brien’s cosmopolitan feminism and Mitchell’s militant pacifism produce distinct optics – but read together they show how Irish writers catch on to Europe by arguing through Spain. Mitchell is especially instructive for how she stages politics on the move. Her pacifism, as María Losada Friend emphasises in her comparative account of Mitchell and the Irish-American Ursuline Sister Monica Maginnis, is “based on anarchist principles”, and it licenses a selection of images from both sides of the conflict. By contrast, Maginnis’s conservative Catholic background orientates And then the Storm (1937) toward an open defence of the Nationalist cause. In the words of Losada Friend in this issue, the approaching storm metaphor they share names a European crisis more than a merely Spanish one; in their hands, “Spain” becomes a moving weather system of ideas blowing across borders. To read these books as Irish travel writing is, then, to read them as European diagnostics.

The gendered valences of the Spanish screen matter too. In 1940, Walter Starkie delivered a lecture in Dublin on “The Women of Spain”, praising their contribution to public life at precisely the moment when Franco’s regime was reversing the Republic’s liberal gains. This disjunction makes Spanish womanhood into a stage on which Irish audiences could watch competing liberal and conservative scripts of femininity play out, and in doing so reflect on the politics of womanhood at home. The Irish debate, in other words, went by way of Spain’s staged contradictions; the “European” could be imported to recalibrate what was perceived as ordinary or mundane in Ireland. This is imagology doing ethical work. A stereotype (Spain as fervently Catholic, passionately tragic) can harden into cliché; but in these Irish texts it also becomes an analytic device, a way to hold up Irish arguments to broader light. The risk, of course, is that the screen blinds, yet the best of these writers are alert to that danger, which turns stereotype into counter-image and makes travel the condition for unlearning.

The formal story loops back here. Beckett’s 1934 polemic is not a quarrel about taste but a wager on what kinds of literary style can shoulder the pressure of a European present. As Brown notes, Irish poetics in the 1930s were shaped by “an absence of that urge to make it new” that European manifestos cultivated (Brown 2010: 91). Beckett, borrowing the manifestos’ urgency, throws down a gauntlet: either Irish verse remains an antiquarian cabinet of curiosities, or it dares forms capacious enough to think with and against Europe (Belis 1934: 235-36; Davis and Jenkins 2000: 143). That the essay occludes women like Salkeld is no surprise; what Condon’s article shows is how Salkeld’s poetry and networks complicate Beckett’s tidy binary, and how the Dublin press ecology (her Gayfield Press broadsheets) situated Irish modernism within a feminist and collaborative print culture. From this vantage, “Catholic Europe” appears less as a doctrinal label than as a stylistic problem. How does one write a Catholic modernism against the grain of piety, or a secular modernism that understands ritual’s cultural heft? O’Brien and Mitchell answer by form: supple sentences capable of holding contradiction or travelogues that cannot be contained to a single camp are provided as solutions. Butler answers by a cool moral prose that exposes the false sanctities of respectability. Later writers (Maurice Leitch among them) answer by testing Irish memory against Spanish ruins.

Leitch’s Gone to Earth (2019) lets us glimpse the long afterlife of these exchanges. Set in postwar Spain but tethered to Irish experience through Eugene Furlong – an Irish expatriate and former volunteer in the Civil War – the novel makes the Spanish landscape a mirror for Irish conflicts and silences. As Alberto Lázaro shows in his reading, Leitch’s Spanish topography becomes a transnational memory machine, where haunted places and suppressed histories refract Ulster’s own legacies of violence. In formal terms, the novel extends what earlier travel writing and essays inaugurated: using another European place not as exotic ornament but as an angle of vision on the Irish past. That movement is not a repudiation of Irishness but a demand to take Ireland’s entanglements seriously. If the nineteenth century made “the continent” into a backdrop for Irish Catholic aspiration and emigration, the twentieth century’s wars, alliances, and economic transformations re-wired those circuits. Writers followed suit, crafting texts that show how Europe’s unresolved histories exceed national containers while still cutting sharply into local lives.

Plotted against political time – the Free State, debates surrounding the state’s (un)neutrality during the Emergency, accession to the European Communities, the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger – this literary story looks less like a sequence than a braid. O’Brien, Starkie and Mitchell among others write the 1930s Europe of faith and ideology; Butler writes the 1940s and ’50s Europe of reckoning and exposure; Leitch writes the afterlives. Poems, essays, novels, travelogues – the forms change, but the function holds: Europe is the theatre in which Irish writers test narratives of self and community. The lines between East and West are blurred when tracing their steps; Starkie’s travels across the continent, from Italy to Spain and to Central Europe demonstrate this. His travelogue, Raggle-Taggle: Adventures with a Fiddle in Hungary and Roumania (1933), was not the only testament to his admiration for the culture and musical traditions of the European continent; its northern Spanish counterpart was published just one year later (1934), followed by several others.

That braid is precisely what this special-issue frame identifies: Irish images of Europe evolve as historical circumstances shift, but their uses within Irish debates remain remarkably stable. Europe is intermittently admired and distrusted; it is a resource, a threat, an alibi, a hope. To read across disciplines – as this issue does – is to see how literary and historical modes reinforce and correct each other. The complexity of identities when assessing different manifestations of Irishness is apparent in interwar as well as post-1945 Europe. Since the nation-building project in the Free State envisioned independent Ireland as an Irish-speaking and a Catholic state, the spread of anti-Communism was hardly surprising. The multiple waves of “red scares” in Ireland followed international trends and undoubtedly came to serve the interests of the Catholic Church and their conservative ideology. Nevertheless, the voices of Butler and Starkie, both Anglo-Irish Protestants, add a much-needed hyphenated nuance to Irish perceptions of Europe, going beyond popular religious parallels.

Undertaking an interdisciplinary approach that applies both literary and historical lenses for viewing twentieth-century Irish writing allows us to shift the focus to the themes that many of the contributors of this volume were keen to highlight. These included addressing the fear associated with the rise of extreme ideologies and the threat they were perceived to pose to Ireland, or the humanitarian action taken by several transnational subjects in this volume in response to fascist or communist violence, hatred and intolerance. As Patricia Clavin points out, transnationalism is “first and foremost about people: the social space that they inhabit, the networks they form and the ideas they exchange” – the writings that make up this special issue are certainly a testament to this (2005: 422).

A final through-line concerns gender. Spain plays a starring role not only as a theatre of ideological conflict but as a crucible for debating femininity. Veronica Barry’s contribution argues that Irish publics in the 1930s and 1940s followed Spanish women’s changing status closely, measuring the Republic’s liberal vision against the Francoist model of domestic Catholic womanhood. That attention, in turn, opened a space – however limited – to reflect upon Irish women’s position at home through a sideways glance. The “European woman” becomes a comparative figure: a lens to scrutinise the costs and promises of different Catholic modernities. Read back into Beckett’s 1934 polemic and Condon’s recovery of Salkeld, gender clarifies what the old “antiquarian versus others” frame could not: that the terms of Irish modernism’s European alignment were themselves gendered. The argument about style was also, implicitly, an argument about who counts as a serious maker of style. Re-situating Salkeld within Dublin’s press ecology does not just add a missing name; it reveals how networks of collaboration and care – often feminised and thus critically undervalued – were foundational to Ireland’s versions of European modernism. This is not a detour. The imagined Europe of Irish literature has always been gendered; noticing that fact is a condition for reading it well.

Pairing the Irish-London journalist Mairin Mitchell’s Storm over Spain (1937) with the Irish-American Ursuline Sister Monica Maginnis’s And then the Storm (1937), Losada Friend reads two contemporaneous travel accounts that share a weather metaphor but diverge sharply in political optic. Mitchell’s anarchist-inflected pacifism yields a cross-cut montage of both sides, while Maginnis’s religious formation underwrites an open defence of the Nationalist cause. The comparative frame shows how “Spain” functions as a European storm system – felt across borders – and how Irish writers calibrated their ethical responses accordingly. Losada Friend makes a strong case for reading travel books as cultural documents that track, in real time, the internationalisation of the Spanish conflict, and the ways it reorganised Irish conversations about Europe.

Tyrrell sets Farewell Spain and Storm over Spain within an Irish cultural matrix where Catholic identity and secular state culture rub productively against each other. His central insight is elegant: O’Brien urges Ireland to “catch on to Europe”, while Mitchell tracks “Irish tracks” across European terrains, Spain above all. Both resist insularity, using Catholic Europe as a forum to be Irish and cosmopolitan at once. Tyrrell’s essay thus bridges literary lives and national histories and clarifies why Spain became such a potent stage for Irish writers negotiating proximity to, and difference from, Britain and “the anglosphere”.

By drawing attention to how Mitchell addressed the socio-economic inequalities in interwar Spain, thereby placing the question of land reforms and redistribution in an international context, Veronica Barry illustrates the diversity of Irish women’s perceptions of the Spanish Civil War. Her contribution to the growing research exploring the literary works of Irish women writers reveals that Nora Connolly-O’Brien, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Aileen O’Brien, among other Irish women, were active on both sides of the conflict. Regardless of their political convictions, they interpreted the war as an imminent threat to Ireland, under the guise of different extreme ideological movements. Barry’s investigation of Irish women’s involvement in the provision of non-partisan aid in Spain is a particularly crucial addition to scholarship on transnational humanitarian networks and Ireland’s role in them.

Starting from Beckett’s pseudonymous “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934) – that notorious sorting of “antiquarians” and “others” – Condon recovers Blanaid Salkeld from occlusion, tracing cordial exchanges between Beckett and Salkeld in 1939 and mapping Salkeld’s editorial and creative work with the Gayfield Press broadsheet series. With access to Salkeld’s archive, the article maps a collaborative ecology that complicates simple tales of Irish modernism’s European allegiances. Along the way, Condon revisits key critical claims about the 1930s scene to insist that Irish modernism’s “European turn” was not only male, nor only metropolitan, but also mediated by women’s labour in print culture.

Lázaro reads Leitch’s final novel as a transnational meditation on exile, memory, and historical trauma. By pairing Diego, a Spaniard in concealment, and Eugene Furlong, an Irish expatriate and former Civil War volunteer, Gone to Earth makes Spain a mirror in which Irish legacies of violence refract and return. Drawing on trauma and memory studies, the essay argues that Leitch’s Spanish setting is not a backdrop but a method: a way to narrate Irish conflicts obliquely, with the gain in ethical nuance that obliquity affords.

O’Malley’s essay provides insights into the significance of respectability in the writings of Hubert Butler, whose provincial cosmopolitanism lay at the heart of his ethical perspective on society. By shedding light on the transnational linkages between Butler’s Croatian and Irish experiences, O’Malley critically addresses the often-ignored importance of small nations in Irish writing and draws attention to why Butler urged that smaller, peripheral countries should communicate directly with each other, particularly in the context of the Cold War. This echoes the claim of Clavin who stressed that “smaller countries are always considered to be more outward-looking because they have to be”, which ultimately contributed to Irish attempts at forging new, transnational links with the wider world throughout the first half of the twentieth century (2010: 632). While the crimes committed by the fascist Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and the involvement of the Catholic Church in them were the focus of Butler’s essays on postwar Yugoslavia, O’Malley adds another layer of meaning to the perceptions of extreme ideologies and the crimes committed in their names, in a wider European framework.

Marzena Keating’s book, entitled Continuity and Change in the Irish Culinary History and Culture, 1922–1973 (2025), reveals how culinary issues mirrored the formulation of Irish national identity during the first five decades of independence. In addition to highlighting the book’s contribution to the historiography of Irish food, this special issue also draws attention to how Keating traces the role of Irish women in relation to tradition and novelty, feasting and fasting, food scarcity and economic hardship, as well as scientific and technological modernisation. By reminding her readers that migration from and to Ireland remained significant throughout the twentieth century, Keating demonstrates the complexity of Irish culinary experiences and points to the links between the (self-)image of independent Ireland and the socio-cultural, economic and religious transformation of this outward-looking small nation.

Ultimately, the authors in this special issue aim to offer an assessment of the plurality of Irish images of Europe. Their essays add to our current understanding of transnational transfers and comparisons between Ireland and Europe throughout the twentieth century by placing so far often-neglected voices of individuals and communities at the centre of our attention. Furthermore, they also invite their readers to join them in tracing how, as noted above, perceptions of and connections with Europe contributed to Irish writing becoming European.

Acknowledgements

The co-editors of this special issue would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Department of Philology of the University of Almería, the English Studies Division of the University of Almeria, Lindisfarne Research Group, CySOC and PPIT-UAL, Junta de Andalucía- ERDF 2021-2027, Programme 54.A.