The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture Series

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.

Joe Cleary is Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Modernism, Empire, World Literature (2021), Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, (2007) and Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2001). He is also the volume editor of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (2014) and co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (2005).