This chapter considers the evolution from the 1940s to 1980 of what was initially constructed by Daniel Corkery and others as ‘Anglo-Irish literature’, and its serial problems of inclusion and definition. In particular, it examines the shifting approaches to literary criticism from Seán O’Faoláin’s articles in The Bell to the Crane Bag and Field Day pieces by Seamus Deane in the 1970s and early 1980s. It opens with a discussion of the criticism which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s from Richard Ellmann and W. Y. Tindall, before discussing contributions made to the magazine Studies by Denis Donoghue, Vivian Mercier and Donald Davie, with varying degrees of attachments to New Criticism. This develops into an analysis of the polemical criticism of the 1960s by those such as Conor Cruise O’Brien, before discussing the foundation of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature in 1970, which became a platform for women academics but did not deviate from a general focus on canonical male authors. It concludes by discussing the Troubles-shadowed 1970s criticism of later Field Day critics like Deane and Terence Brown, with the former in particular interrogating literature to reveal its imbrication in what he insisted was a colonial condition.

The period since 1980, one of intense social change in Ireland, has witnessed manifold scholarly and intellectual breakthroughs, a weighty library of historiography, and a fluorescence of cultural criticism that has greatly enriched our understanding of Ireland and the Irish story. Yet despite its scholarly and intellectual achievements, there are besetting contradictions and conflicts in the field that we call ‘Irish studies’. Irish studies has a national focus, but an inextricably international institutional ecology. This essay charts the story of Irish studies alert to these contradictions. It examines how and where it developed as a scholarly field, how it responded to internal and external pressures, including the Troubles. It considers how Irish studies negotiated academic frames such as postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural theory and, relatedly, the lasting impact of revisionist-nationalist debates. It analyses how consensus and debate formed what Irish studies covered and, as importantly, what it did not. It concludes by considering the impact of the transnational turn on Irish studies in the twenty-first century.