‘The Transnational Irish Novel’ explores a recent phenomenon in contemporary Irish fiction; the increasing prevalence of Irish novels that are set wholly, or substantially, outside of Ireland, which is referred to as ‘transnational fiction’. Central to the argument is the concept of focalisation. For instance, while a novel such as Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) is set largely in the United States, the narrative is focalised by an Irish character, and thus more fully resembles a novel of migration. By contrast, Tóibín’s The Master (2004) does not involve Irish focalisation. Similarly, there are works by Colum McCann, Joseph O’Connor, and Sebastian Barry in which a specifically Irish focalisation diminishes; or, in Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), where it is dispersed. Ultimately, it is argued that this tendency towards the dispersal and even the dismissal of a distinctively Irish perspective is a feature of Irish fiction in a globalised world.

‘Irish Fiction and Migration in the Long Twenty-First Century’ observes that while migration has been a topic prominent in Irish fiction since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, more recent novels have considered the Irish subject overseas as a product of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’, migrants in a world characterised by neoliberalism and globalisation. The chapter considers works of outward migration in the long twenty-first century, beginning with William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and extending to later works, such as Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and E. M. Reapy’s Red Dirt (2016), as well as historical fiction including Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004). The flows of migration into Ireland are also considered, in relation to Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), Oona Frawley’s Flight (2014), and Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers (2020), concluding that recent Irish diasporic fiction is characterised by multiple displacements.

‘A Splintered Past: History in the Irish Novel since 1990’ considers the ways in which contemporary Irish novelists have represented three phases of modern Irish history: the Famine; the revolutionary period; social liberalisation since the 1960s. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), in its relative optimism about the contribution of the catastrophe to national self-consciousness, is contrasted with Paul Lynch’s Grace (2017) and Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016). Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) provides a child’s-eye view of the Easter Rising, while Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) witnesses the Rising from the perspective of a soldier returned from the Second World War, and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) filters partition through childhood memories. As we reach Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster (2014) or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021), historical traumas become comprehensible only in personal terms, and the capacity for collective narrativisation is less prevalent or accessible.

Since the 1960s, Sean O’Casey’s own life has repeatedly been a source of fascination for dramatists, and there have been a number of dramatic reconstructions of his life, often based on his own autobiographical writings. The best-known of these dramatisations was the 1965 MGM film, Young Cassidy, directed by John Ford and Jack Cardiff. This chapter examines this Hollywood version of O’Casey’s life and discusses a number of alternative biographical dramatisations. These dramatisations include the popular ABC television series Young Indiana Jones in 1992; Hal Prince’s 1992 play about O’Casey’s life, Grandchild of Kings; and Colm Tóibín’s 2004 play Beauty in a Broken Place (2004).

As the Irish LGBTQ+ community has emerged in a period of radical and rapid social change, the figure of the queer is often made to function as a figure for social progress. By focusing on recent queer critical work on time and temporalities, this chapter asks how the queer figure of the contemporary fails to address lingering traumas of social stigma and violence (including the 1982 antigay murder of Declan Flynn) and also fails to fully account for the connection of temporalities to sexual identity and belonging. By examining representations of sexual bodies in and out of sync with normative social and temporal structures – particularly in literature by Irish lesbian writers, such as Emma Donoghue and Mary Dorcey – this chapter foregrounds the ways that temporalities script and structure the sexual and how some forms of queer identity and community may resist or rethink those scripts through alternative registers of time.

This chapter offers a study of some key developments in Irish realism from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. The Irish novel in a variety of forms, including the bildungsroman, the family novel, the expatriate novel and political fiction, has developed significantly in this period and its highest achievements are distinguished by memorable characterisation, probing social critique, and lyrical writing. Stressing issues of form, style, and affect as well as content, the study examines a selection of Irish fictions, urban and rural, domestic and overseas, northern and southern, and considers their relationship to wider and ongoing changes in Irish society in recent times.

This chapter reflects on the implications of censorship for writers working after 1940, first, by questioning the extent to which its imposition hampered the expression of a modern literary generation, and second, by exploring the strategies through which it was sidestepped and transgressed by both writers and readers in this period. It considers both the cultural implications of domestic censorship for Irish writers between 1940 and 1980, and the means that existed for circumventing the policing of ‘foreign’ literature. It highlights the pervasive effects of censorship across the middle decades of the century. First, the focus is on Kate O’Brien, Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, all born before independence, who found themselves directly at odds with the country they had seen created. Faced with the banning of their own books, they battled to resist official strictures of their work. It then considers a subsequent generation of writers – including Edna O’Brien, Leland Bardwell, John Montague, John McGahern and Julia O’Faoláin – born during a period in which censorship had already become embedded within Irish literary culture. Finally, this chapter concludes by examining the experience of Colm Tóibín, who grew up in the 1950s, when censorship was still a dominant force.

The collapse of the authority, credibility, and influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland, a process that had begun in the 1960s and 1970s and was given added momentum by the revelation of child abuse and institutional scandals in the 1990s, continued unabated in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In tandem, while Ireland remained a country with a high degree of religious practice by international standards, many Irish Catholics decided to become Catholics on their own terms and Irish society became increasingly secularised, as was made clear when Ireland became the first country in the world to approve gay marriage through a referendum vote in 2015, while abortion was legalised following a referendum in 2018. This chapter explores how a range of Irish writers navigated and explored these themes, in poems, novels, and plays and considers the searching questions they asked about the weight of complex history underpinning the changes and their own role in characterising a society whose faith and religiosity were in transition.