‘Irish Fiction and Gender in the Long Twenty-First Century’ begins by observing that fiction by Irish women is in a position of unprecedented authority, and is winning critical and commercial success on a scale never seen before. Referencing Anna Burns, Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, and others, the chapter also explores Edna O’Brien’s novel Wild Decembers (1999) and Soula Emmanuel’s Wild Geese (2023). It is argued that between these two novels, we can trace not only changes in Irish society but also some of the ways in which gender is produced and defined by social context. It extends this analysis to a range of twenty-first-century novels, including Mary Costello’s The River Capture (2019) and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021). Although these novels deploy a range of fictional techniques, it is noted that there is a recurrence of modernist forms, which the author refers to as a ‘stubborn modernism’.

‘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.