Like many of the little magazines of the early twentieth century, Dana has been all but lost to memory, surviving largely in the occasional footnote which duly cites it as the journal in which one of James Joyce’s earliest published poems appeared. Nevertheless, in the scant twelve issues published in Dublin between May 1904 and April 1905 the magazine provided a remarkable forum for cultural and literary debates. Refusing to adhere any strict sectarian divide and deeply suspicious of a growing nativism, it played a vital role in what F. S. L. Lyons calls “a phase of fusion and co-operation” in Irish cultural life “when everything seemed possible.”
