University Press of Florida Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett

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 anticolonial 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 were 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. Review "[An] admirable book . . . Repositions the artistic subject as something different from the biographical Joyce, Bowen, or Beckett, cohering as a series of particular aesthetic responses to the dilemma of belonging in an Irish context."--James Joyce Broadsheet"A smart and compelling approach to Irish expatriate modernism. . . . An important new book that will have a lasting impact on postcolonial Irish studies."--Breac"Demonstrat[es]. . .just what it is that makes comparative readings of history, politics, literature, theory, and culture indispensable to the work that defines what is best and most relevant about scholarship in the humanities today."--Modern Fiction Studies"Pearson is convincing in arguing that Irish writers often straddle the space between national identity and a sense of belonging to a larger, more cosmopolitan environment."--Choice About the Author Nels Pearson is associate professor of English and director of the Program in Irish Studies at Fairfield University, USA. He is coeditor of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World.