Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging set of essays exploring the travels of Irish literature and culture over the last century and more. The essays focus on writers and artists whose work has been taken up and re-read overseas; on cultural producers who have engaged with transnational scales in their work; and on critical practices that pay attention to comparative, global, and planetary dimensions of Irish literature and culture. Nation and territory have long been central to cultural production in Ireland, especially as both remain significantly contested, but a continued focus on these inherited scales has hindered critical attention to transnational routes and roots that exist alongside and challenge the nation. This volume sets agenda for the future of study of transnationalism in Irish literature and culture, recognizing the need for a new set of theories and methodologies that are adequate to our emerging world.
Acknowledgments; Contributors; Introduction: a weak theory of transnationalism Cóilín Parsons; Part I. Transnational Genealogies: 1. 'A World of New Wonders': Maria Edgeworth's Atlantic ecology and the limits of transnationalism in the nineteenth century Sonja Lawrenson; 2. 'I'm apparently not famous anymore': appropriating Dion Boucicault's octoroon and reckoning with racial violence in America Chanté Mouton Kinyon; 3. Destitute recollection: Joyce's Indian translocations Udaya Kumar; 4. 'Under the shadow of the Monument': on first looking into Finnegans Wake Peter D. McDonald; 5. Eironesian Island others: Irish Islands within Pacific waters Maebh Long; Part II. Planets: 6. Stargazing in Joyce and Walcott: navigating colonial entanglements with asterisms Maria McGarrity; 7. Ireland, literature, and the blue humanitie Nicholas Allen; 8. You have gas: reading for Irish energy Michael Rubenstein; 9. 'Unbearably Intimate Connections': Contemporary Irish Poetry and the planet Nathan Suhr-Sytsma; Part III. Missed Translations: 10. Sounding authentic: renditions of Central and Eastern European Literature by Irish writers Aidan O'Malley; 11. Irish literature, (Irish-)American culture, and 'Hiberno-American Blandness' Tara Stubbs; 12. Ngundalehla Godotgai–A Bundjalung version of waiting for Godot Peter Kuch; Part IV. Transnational Futures: 13. Irish fiction, small presses, and the world-system Matthew Eatough; 14. Resources and repertoires: language in Irish fiction after globalization Michael Malouf; 15. Roots and crowns: race and hair culture in traveller and black women's writing Mary M. Burke and Sarah L. Townsend; 16. Conflict and care: Edna O'Brien's Girl, Colum McCann's Apeirogon, and the limits of interculturality Fiona McCann; Bibliography; Index.
Cóilín Parsons' first monograph, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (2016) won the American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize and was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. He has co-edited Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (2015) and Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019).
