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This contribution examines the ways in which contemporary Irish writers, particularly Hugo Hamilton, deliberately recuperate migrant memory in their work in order to visualise cultural hybridity and difference as modes of self-acceptance. The author sets Hamilton's work beside that of his modernist predecessor James Joyce (in particular, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses), in order to compare notions of exile, homesickness, and displacement. Contributions such as this remind us of the relevance of reinterpreting, in the present context of twenty-first century Ireland, canonical texts in order to reveal more fully their multicultural meanings, something that Declan Kiberd has also done at various points in The Irish Writer and the World (2005: 20, 305-7).

This essay examines Sebastian Barry's 2005 novel A Long Long Way, focusing on his representation of Irish characters—the southern Catholic protagonists—who fought for Britain in World War I, and whose sacrifices went long unacknowledged by Ireland. In A Long Long Way, Barry seeks not only to advance his project of enlarging the terms upon which Irishness is constituted but also to elevate World War I to a tragic status it has never attained within postcolonial Irish culture. This essay looks at the textual strategies Barry employs to achieve these ends. It suggests that A Long Long Way is in many respects closer to the nineteenth-century model of historical fiction in its realistic interleaving of the fictional and the factually historic. It also critiques Barry's reliance on sentimentality and sanctification, arguing that they foreground “the problematic aesthetic and polemical aspects” of the novel, resulting in the simplification of its subjects and a diminishment of its empathic and experiential power.

Neil Murphy, comparing contemporary writers with Joyce, Beckett and Flann O'Brien, notes the complex and nuanced relationship between these texts and their cultural contexts. The ‘Celtic Tiger’ period, a moment of the most dramatic impact in recent Irish history, offers an opportunity to consider the nature of the possible relationship between literary fiction and its social and political contexts. Joyce's legendarily disinterested attitude towards World War 1, and his largely disengaged response to the revolutionary upheavals in Ireland between 1916 and 1923, are artistically revealing, particularly since the timeframe of the composition of Ulysses coincides with these historically cataclysmic years in European history. In a direct and antagonistic gesture towards referential writing, In this chapter, Murphy, through close readings of the works of John Banville and Dermot Healy, as well as consideration of Sebastian Barry and Anne Enright, suggests that while they may appear to gaze backwards in time, or into the depths of highly personalized ontological questions, or at the conundrums of artistic form, if one tilts the glass just a little it may be that the reflected image offers us a few useful glimpses of the Celtic Tiger years after all, but by potent, indirect vision

Alison LaCroix and William Birdthistle examine two works: Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), which was made into a film, directed by Anthony Minghella, in 1996. Both novels challenge traditional notions of loyalty in wartime. Although they focus on different wars—Barry on World War I, Ondaatje on World War II—the novels raise a pair of related, crucial questions: Loyalty to what and to whom? The books interrogate the meaning of national sovereignty in an age of empire or imperial decline, as their characters confront law in personal ways. Barry’s novel holds out a slim hope that the birth of the Irish Republic might make comprehensible, even if not justify, the bloodbaths of the Western Front. Ondaatje, however, challenges the primacy of nations, suggesting instead that personal loyalties or regional ties provide the only meaningful connections for individuals uprooted by modern global warfare. Both novels thus force their characters to negotiate an overlapping series of boundaries: local and national political lines, as well as ethnic, familial, and emotional borders.