Irish Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Irish Cosmopolitanism contributes to current reexaminations of modernism’s historical and geographic contexts. Distinct from other studies, it focuses exclusively on Irish expatriates in Europe and considers the novelist Elizabeth Bowen equally alongside James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The book breaks new ground by interpreting Irish expatriate modernism through the lens of recent, alternative theories of cosmopolitanism and critical approaches to global democracy, also known as “cosmopolitics.” Pushing beyond prevailing tendencies to read Irish modernism as either international or postcolonial, it argues that these authors’ works—in content, intellect, and form—emerge from a dynamic, non-hierarchical, and philosophically rigorous interplay of national and global frames of reference. As minority revisions of cosmopolitanism help reveal, Irish expatriates create a unique modernist idiom that challenges the boundaries between culturally-specific and universal belonging, never resting content with either. Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett are global writers precisely because they challenge abstract or idealistic notions of the “universe” and affirm the non-sequential, inconclusive place of national affiliation in global identity. Irish Cosmopolitanism thus builds upon postcolonial approaches to modern Irish literature but also brings them into a richer dialogue with discourses of transnational humanitarianism and the universal human subject. Indeed, it concludes that postcolonial interpretation ultimately leads us to reconceive of how these writers engage internationalism, to recognize how they criticize abstract images of the global, and to envision a more historically continuous model of the human experience beyond states.

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