Dana

May 1904-April 1905; ed. John Eglinton and Frederick Ryan; editorial ethos critical of the role of Catholic thought in Irish society and the cultural exclusiveness of the Gaelic League; contained mostly topical and literary essays; contribs. incl. George Moore, George Russell, Alfred Webb, Stephen Gwynn, Padraic Colum, Horace Plunkett, Oliver Gogarty and Seamus O’Sullivan, among others (Joyce - whose first“Portrait” essay was excluded, being the only one to receive payment for a poem).

Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought, Vol. 1, May 1904-April 1905 (NY: Lemma Publishing Corp. 1970) [unabridged facs. rep.].

John Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits (1935), attributed the failure of Dana to the power of ‘the constituted spiritual authorities in Ireland’ since ‘a new movement of the human mind in Ireland was indeed precisely what was feared’, and further: ‘the noisy language movement, the recrudescence of political agitation, outrage, assassination - anything was preferable to that!’

First editorial laments the absence of a literary organ independent of religious or nationalist propaganda, and proposes to encourage ‘the elemental freedom of the human mind, which is really the essential of all independent and therefore national literature.’

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