| Sumario: | Mary Manning's Mount Venus offers an account of political violence in the Irish Free State during the 1930s. In addition to its satire of various political ideologies, Manning's novel also attempts to define a latent fascist potential within the Free State by identifying the aesthetic preoccupations of anti-Communist and right-wing Catholic groups. Through its fictionalisation of organisations such as Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts, Mount Venus suggests a value in thinking about the importance of aesthetics to a variety of political projects vying for authority and power at a time of political consolidation for the Irish Free State. This essay argues that attending to novels like Mount Venus, which have at times been neglected due to perceived stylistic and formal inconsistencies, reveals new insights into the complex ideological landscape of Ireland in the post-independence period.
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