This book examines how Irishness as national narrative is consistently understood ‘from a distance’. Irish Presidents, critics, and media initiatives focus on how Irishness is a global resource chiefly informed by the experiences of an Irish diaspora predominantly working in English, while also reminding Irish people ‘at home’ that Irish is the 'national tongue'. In returning to some of Ireland’s major expat writers and international diplomats, this book examines the economic reasons for their migration, the opportunities they gained by working abroad (sometimes for the British Empire), and their experiences of writing and governing in non-native English speaking communities such as China and Hong Kong. It argues that their concerns about belonging, loneliness, the desire to buy a place ‘back home’, and losing a language are shared by today’s generation of social network expatriates.

The first monograph-length study of Irish expatriate fiction in an era of transition from American to East Asian global hegemony.

The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

Analyzing the invisible abled body through the work of Joyce, Beckett, Egerton, and Bowen

Contesting the idea that the study of Anglophone literature and literary studies is simply a foreign import in Asia, this collection addresses the genealogies of textual critique and institutionalized forms of teaching of English language and literature in Asia through the 19th and 20th centuries, along with an examination of how its present options and possible future directions relate to these historical contexts. It argues that the establishment of Anglophone literature in Asia did not simply “happen”: there were extra-literary and -academic forces at work, inserting and domesticating in Asian universities both the English language and Anglo-American literature, and their attendant cultural and political values. Offering new perspectives for ongoing conversations surrounding the globalization of Anglophone literature in literary and cultural studies, the book also considers the practicalities of teaching both the language and its canon of classic texts, and that the historical formation and shape of English studies in Asia offers lessons that relate not only to the discipline but also may be applied to the humanities as a whole. ​

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to Irish modernism, offering readers an accessible overview of key writers and artists.

Exile has become a potent symbol of Polish and Irish cultures. Historical, political and cultural predicaments of both countries have branded them as diasporic nations: but, in Adorno's dictum, for an exile writing becomes home. Olszewska offers a multifaceted picture of the figure of exile in postwar Poland and Ireland, juxtaposing politics and culture: whereas Irish exile appears more in an economic and cultural context, the essence of Polish exile is political. This comparative study of works by Polish and Irish authors -- Stanisław Barańczak, Adam Zagajewski, Marek Hłasko, Kazimierz Brandys, Brian Moore, Desmond Hogan and Paul Muldoon -- shows a literature which not only depicts the experience of exile, but which uses exile as a literary device.

Offers a bold new argument about how Irish, American and Caribbean modernisms helped remake the twentieth-century world literary system.

Is it realistic to expect great literature of one language to be re-presented artistically intact in another language? Literary Translation: Quest for Artistic Integrity is a systematic delineation of a practical approach toward that seemingly idealist aim. A summing up of a career devoted to the study of literary translation enriched with the experience of translating between several languages, it offers a clear and thorough exposition of the theory behind Professor Jin's monumental achievement in producing a worthy Chinese Ulysses, illustrated with a profusion of enlightening and instructive examples not only from his own work, but also from that of many others, including some world-famous translators. This makes Literary Translation an invaluable reference to translators of literature between almost any pair of languages, not just Chinese and English. It will also be of considerable interest to teachers and critics of twentieth-century literature in English, to students of Modernism, to researchers in comparative literature and in comparative culture, and to teachers of language.