The historiography of nineteenth-century Irish newspapers centres on the development of a nationalist press nationally and locally, with expansion of readership and titles connected to the great ...waves of politicisation under O’Connell and Parnell. Studies of unionist newspapers tend to focus on Ulster or the
Irish Times
, whose institutional continuity maintains interest in its earlier incarnations, and whose relatively liberal nineteenth-century unionism was directed at the Dublin Protestant middle classes. There was, however, another type of nineteenth-century Southern unionist newspaper addressing a conservative audience of landlords, professionals and Church of Ireland clerics. Such diehard newspapers often clung to older business models involving limited readership, and underpinned their activities by second jobs and patronage from local elites, though the Dublin Tory press developed a somewhat wider audience.
The genre of sentimental fiction of small-town and rural life influenced by theologically liberal Presbyterianism known as 'kailyard' originated in Scotland in the late nineteenth century but ...survived in Ulster into the 1950s, some decades after it had become outmoded in Scotland. The Presbyterian minister Hubert Quinn (1901–72) was one of the later Ulster exponents of 'kailyard' fiction; this paper charts Quinn's gradual retreat from London to Belfast publishers and eventual self-publication as the kailyard genre became less marketable, his literary responses to the political-sectarian conflict of early twentieth-century Ireland, to the Second World War and to modernist-fundamentalist disputes within Irish Presbyterianism, and his combination of Christian socialism and theological liberalism with anti-modernist idealisation of rural life, fear of mechanical modernity and anti-feminism.
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