This collection looks beyond Ireland metaphorically as well as geographically, moving beyond nationalism towards the culturally diverse, beyond a bilingual Ireland to a polyvocal one, beyond the imagined community towards a virtual one, beyond a territorial Ireland to an excentric one. The focus is on outsiders, ranging from Colm Tóibín’s subversion of establishment norms to Paul Muldoon’s immersion in Jewish discourse to John Banville’s extensions of the parameters of Irishness to the Lass of Aughrim finding a new role through her exclusion from the domestic hearth. The contributors to the volume work mainly with poetry and prose fiction, but genres such as autobiography, the essay and song lyrics are also represented. The issues addressed all look ‘beyond Ireland’. In considering the creative frictions and fictions that result from the dissolving of old loyalties, these essays examine contested concepts such as ‘the nation’, and attempt to shed light on global forces that demand cultural re-definitions and transformations. The world order that let loose the Celtic Tiger has brought, together with a diversified Ireland, new forms of dependence. It is one of the main aims of this book to explore how Irish writers have regarded this diversification and contested that dependence.

Hedda Friberg-Harnesk is Associate Professor at Mid Sweden University, Härnösand. Within the field of Irish Studies, her primary research interest is the fiction of John Banville. Gerald Porter is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Vaasa, Finland. His main field of interest is in the mediation of vernacular song, and he has also published on constructions of national identity and on literary representations of social disorder. Joakim Wrethed is Visiting Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. His main fields of research are Irish Studies, phenomenology, aesthetics and metaphor theory.

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