Through increased immigration, Ireland has encountered Central and Eastern Europe in a very direct manner since the mid-1990s. However, there was already a scattered history of cultural communication between these two regions, even if these dialogues have often been discrete and discontinuous. Recovering and exploring some of these diverse interrelationships, this volume charts some of the alternative, lesser-known routes that Irish cultural life has taken. By plotting various movements between these two peripheries of Europe, the book recalibrates the map of Irish literary, artistic and historical experiences. In doing so, it also looks to incorporate this movement into theoretical understandings of Irish culture.

Aidan O’Malley teaches at the University of Rijeka and at the University of Zagreb, where he is establishing a Centre for Irish Studies. The author of Field Day and the Translation of Irish Identities: Performing Contradictions (2011), he has also published articles and chapters on contemporary Irish literature and cultural translation. He has also edited a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies, ‘Myths of Europe: East of Venice’, that examines literary and cultural interactions between Central and Eastern Europe and the Anglophone world in the post-Cold War period. Eve Patten is Associate Professor of English and Head of School at Trinity College Dublin. She graduated from Oxford and completed her PhD at Trinity, then held a two-year Junior Fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies in Queen’s University Belfast. She worked for several years for the British Council in Eastern Europe before returning to Trinity as a lecturer in 1996. She teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish writing, specializing in modern and contemporary Irish fiction in English and the literature of the Second World War. Her most recent publication is Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War (2012).