The Minerva Press brand was officially retired in 1820, but its reputation, influence, and significance as an avatar of literary excess persisted long past that end-point. Not only did its erstwhile publisher, A. K. Newman, continue a robust publishing business under his own name in the same premises for more than a decade, but derogatory references to the Press in popular media continued to rise in the decade following its demise. The epilogue begins with an account of the last two Minerva novels, belatedly published in 1821, and traces the press’s influence from them through its reputation in the 1830s and 1840s, concluding with a discussion of the fate of these countless works, long unwanted by copyright libraries, and an account of the publisher Henry Colburn, whose large-scale publishing business attracted many of the same criticisms in the 1820s and 1830s as Lane and Newman’s had done at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The epilogue concludes in the present day, examining recent reappearances of the Minerva Press in historical romance novels and exploring the affinities between popular fiction then and now.

The display shelves of Irish bookstores, while showcasing the occasional Yeats collection or Joyce novel, are filled largely with crime fiction, romance novels, and young adult (YA) books. This chapter surveys the status of the crime novel in Ireland, a topic that has drawn established “highbrow” writers such as John Banville, who writes successful crime novels under the pseudonym of Benjamin Bratton, as well as other talented scribes including Tana French. This chapter also examines the popular romance, or “chick lit” – a genre dominated by Irish women writers since the days of Rosa Mulholland – and its success in work by Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern, and Sarah Harte. It also attends to the growing influence of children’s and young adult fiction, particularly focusing on the boom in YA fiction, led by writers such as Louise O’Neill. What do these books, and their popularity, tell us about contemporary Ireland? Are these forms of genre fiction inherently conservative?