The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization

The first monograph-length study of Irish expatriate fiction in an era of transition from American to East Asian global hegemony.

Joe Cleary (Author)

9781108833578, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 November 2021

280 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.6 cm, 0.54 kg

'The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization is a very significant work because it establishes terms on which scholars of the contemporary Irish novel will need to engage. It also lays the foundations for those engagements by providing a foundational theoretical framework; indeed, for such scholars, this book will be indispensable.' Eoghan Smith

This study of contemporary Irish expatriate fiction offers a boldly original world-facing rather than nation-focused overview of the contemporary Irish novel. Chapters examine how Irish narrative deals with the United States in a time of declining global hegemony, a rising China and Asia, a thwarted and turbulent Global South, and a European Union that has decisively reshaped Ireland in the last half century. The author argues that in a late capitalist world defined by volatile economic and cultural globalizations, the Irish novel is struggling to imagine new ways to narrate the country's relationship to the world capitalist system and to find new place for Irish writing in the world literary system. Looking at a rapidly-changing Ireland in a rapidly-changing international order, Joe Cleary offers new readings of novels by Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Joseph O'Neill, Deirdre Madden, Mary Costello, Naoise Dolan, Aidan Higgins, Colum McCann, Ronan Sheehan and Ronan Bennett.

Introduction: revaluations of Irish expatriate fiction
1. After America: the Irish transatlantic novel in the program era
2. Between Byzantium and Beijing: Asia from the Celtic to the American twilight
3. Monstrous modernity of the global south
4. Elusive Europes: new futures, old traumas?
Conclusion: the weight of the world.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]