The Cuala Press: Women, publishing, and the conflicted genealogies of 'feminist publishing' [An article from: Women's Studies International Forum]

This digital document is a journal article from Women's Studies International Forum, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The Cuala Press, a fine art press run by Elizabeth Yeats around Dublin during the first half of the twentieth century, has long been recognised amongst scholars of Irish literature and history. But the press has been analysed almost exclusively through the interpretative lenses of poet W.B. Yeats, the Yeats family, and the Irish Renaissance. The article challenges such received understandings of Cuala by considering the press as a gendered publishing enterprise: one run by a woman, employing only women, and designed to create work and economic independence for Irish working girls. Through examining the origins of Cuala, the locus of editorial power within the press, and Cuala's complexly ambivalent relationship with modernist Irish suffrage and nationalist women's networks, the article situates the post-1970 feminist publishing boom within a historical trajectory. It suggests that scholarly knowledge of women's publishing history may be crucially dependent upon the health of contemporary feminist presses.