The Conclusion discusses the limits and achievements of Irish expatriate fiction and looks towards future developments. Because of a small domestic literary market, a globe-straddling diaspora and increasingly multiracial population, Irish literary expatriation appears likely to continue into the future though it will take new directions. World-facing expatriate novels can contribute usefully to the development of more internationalist-minded readerships and can stimulate rather than retard the domestic novel. However, it is never easy to surmount inherited ways of seeing the world and literature competes with stronger media that are corporate-owned or dominated by the leading states. The novel cannot create the world anew, then, but at its best can cultivate more worldly readers willing to think and act anew.

This chapter considers the impact of what Mark McGurl has called ‘the Program Era’ on recent Irish fiction. It tracks the emergence of a new kind of Irish novel moving back and forth across the Atlantic between Ireland and the United States. Taking Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic and Mary Costello’s Academy Street as examples, the chapter proposes that these works indicate the gravitational force of American cultural and economic supremacy in ‘the Program Era’ as the United States has drawn Irish writing into its orbit. However, even as the Irish Transatlantic novel attests to some convergences of Irish and American realities, the form also hints at an autumn or early winter of American global hegemony.

Chapter 3 reads Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in Lumumba’s Congo, and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, a neohistorical romance set in nineteenth-century Paraguay. Bennett’s work unsettles late imperial English realist conventions to contest the apolitical apathy that characterizes much contemporary fiction about Africa and offers a related critique of Irish revisionism. Enright’s experimental novel explores the meaning of ‘female adventure’ and ‘emancipation’ in a catastrophic wartime setting. Both novels express anxieties about whether the novel as form can offer something more than just passive or compromised testimonies to violence in the Global South. In both instances, new modes of Irish political fiction struggle to release themselves from inherited colonial discourses.

Ireland has a long history of expatriate writers yet the subject has attracted little critical attention. Forms and meanings of expatriation have changed over time but the fact of expatriation has remained consistent. Daniel Corkery, a leading early twentieth-century critic, deemed expatriation an obstacle to the development of a robust domestic national literature; today, it is more likely to be positively valued as a sign of outward-looking worldliness. The introduction examines changing conceptions and contours of Irish literary expatriation and situates the Irish experience between metropolitan Anglo-American and Anglophone postcolonial instances. Exploring how the Irish novel engages with realigning economic and literary world systems, the study examines Irish narrative constructions of the United States, Asia, the Global South and Europe.

Chapter 2 surveys some different ways in which Asia features in the Irish literary imagination from Lafcadio Hearn and W. B. Yeats to the present. Ronan Sheehan’s Foley’s Asia, dealing with a celebrated nineteenth-century Irish sculptor of imperial monuments, and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, set in Hong Kong against the backdrop of a ‘rising China’, are its contemporary examples. In early twentieth-century writing, Asia represented an exotic non-modern alternative to Western modernity. Later, it served as a backdrop to the fall of the British Empire. More recently, it suggests a strange new hyper-modernity with which the West will have to catch up. In all versions, Asia is conceived somewhere between the exotic and apocalyptic, a world at once tantalizing and threatening.

The European Union has reshaped Irish society over the past half-century, yet in Irish fiction Europe typically appears as a site of aesthetic discovery or historical trauma rather than as immediate political reality. Contemporary Irish writing belongs more to an Anglo-American than to a European literary sphere, and Irish novels in Europe often ponder the ‘Americanization’ of European and Irish modernity. Aidan Higgins’s Balcony of Europe and Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone depict Irish expatriates exploring what it means to live between Europe and the United States. In both narratives, the protagonists are romantically involved with Americans and attached to European landscapes, yet neither émigré finds some sustaining new local or supranational sociopolitical form beyond the nation-state.

The 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode of Ulysses makes questions of personal and national literary rivalry its topic. Stephen Dedalus’s wrestling with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in front of a skeptical audience in the National Library acts out the dramas of mimetic rivalry and anxiety of influence that are the chapter’s theme. Here, Joyce reflects on the nature of literary production and on national and international literary competition and consecration. The episode compresses a compendium of irreverent earlier Irish readings of Shakespeare into Stephen’s performance and transacts Joyce’s ongoing rivalry with his own Irish contemporaries, this articulated in a ghostly or doubled timeframe that counterpoints the 1904 Dublin of the novel’s setting to the 1922 Paris of Ulysses’ eventual triumphant publication. 'Scylla and Charybdis' satirizes the liberal humanist sentimentalism of the Goethean concept of weltliteratur. Weltliteratur, in Ulysses, consecrates the texts it elevates into a cosmopolitan supranational system that claims to be neutrally above the national field and its melancholy petty obsessions; nevertheless, national rivalries are essential to world literary systems and even when, maybe especially when, they are elevated to 'world classics' canonical texts are made to serve some political purpose.

The Great Gatsby and Long Day’s Journey are as near as the twentieth-century United States came to creating successful novelistic and theatrical modernist epics. Each work proffers a tale of male rags-to-riches success: James Gatz’s remaking of his impoverished Midwestern self as the gorgeous Long Island millionaire, Jay Gatsby; James Tyrone’s climb from immigrant slum destitution in Buffalo to become the wealthy Broadway star-actor in The Count of Monte Cristo. Both works offer tempting visions of class bonding in the marriage of upper- and lower-class men and women, and of 'high' and 'popula' cultural coupling through male friendship or filial relations. However, in the end, no fructifying totalization succeeds; instead, things come apart and tales of epic overcoming become world-weary tragedies. In their respective ways, Gatsby and Long Day’s Journey testify to the spellbinding seductiveness of American 'low' or 'mass' culture only to suggest the ultimate incompatibility of merging high cultural sophistication with low cultural glamour and popularity. In the age of American ascendancy, American high culture and American mass culture, like Faust and Mephistopheles, need but destroy each other, titanic ambition ending in mutual ruin.

Nineteenth-century British and French intellectuals set the terms by which Europe evaluated Irish and American cultures before World War I. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America proposed that democratic literatures would be deformed by social levelling and market forces and unable to rival aristocratic literatures for distinction. Rare exceptions might occur at brief tipping points when democratic and aristocratic cultures mutually contested and energized each other, but the emergence of a new mass culture less sophisticated than classical or aristocratic literatures seemed inevitable. In Studies in Celtic Literature, Matthew Arnold proposed that though the Celtic peoples of the United Kingdom were too unruly to govern their own affairs, their literatures possessed qualities of lyrical imagination that might usefully correct the worst elements of a materialist modern English culture. Nineteenth-century literary renaissances in Ireland and the United States were founded upon and reacted against these discourses. William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound emerged as especially important figures, daringly reworking received literary discourses to set the terms for a brilliant new modernism that sometimes became stridently anti-democratic in its bid to challenge the degradation of taste that nineteenth-century liberal writers like Tocqueville and Arnold had forecast.