This chapter explores Bowen’s relation to Ireland in literary and cultural criticism over the past half century. It charts how developments and trends in literary criticism – the rise of postcolonial studies and Irish studies, the development of ‘Irish modernism’ as a critical category – have shaped how we understand Bowen as an Irish writer, and her fiction as Irish literature, in the twenty-first century. In particular, it examines whether Bowen’s work readily corresponds to the nationalist and statist concerns that the category of Irish literature often implies. Through a reading of how Bowen figures Ireland and Irishness in A World of Love (1955), I suggest that Bowen’s Irish modernism operates beyond the limits of national and nationalist history, a circumstance that enables a reconsideration of some of the limits and ideologies of the category of Irish literature.