Irish Cosmopolitanism ─ Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett

“Clearly written, convincingly argued, and transformative.”—Nicholas Allen, author of Modernism, Ireland and Civil War

“Shows how three important Irish writers crafted forms of cosmopolitan thinking that spring from, and illuminate, the painful realities of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle.”—Marjorie Howes, author of Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History

Looking at the writing of three Irish expatriates who lived in Trieste, London, and Paris, Nels Pearson challenges conventional critical trends that view their work as either affirming Irish anti-colonial sentiment or embracing international identity. In reality, he argues, these writers work constantly back and forth between a sense of national belonging that remains incomplete and ideas of human universality tied to their new global environments. For these and many other Irish writers, national and international concerns do not conflict, but overlap—and the interplay between them motivates Irish modernism.

Joyce’s Ulysses strives to articulate the interdependence of an Irish identity and a universal perspective. Bowen’s exiled, unrooted characters are never firmly rooted in the first place. And in Beckett, the unsettled origin is felt most keenly when it is abandoned for exile. These writers demonstrate the displacement felt by many Irish citizens in an ever-changing Ireland unsteadied by long and turbulent decolonization. Ultimately, their work displays a twofold struggle to pinpoint national identity while adapting to a fluid cosmopolitan world.

Nels Pearson is associate professor of English and director of the Program in Irish Studies at Fairfield University. He is coeditor of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World.