The Conclusion discusses the limits and achievements of Irish expatriate fiction and looks towards future developments. Because of a small domestic literary market, a globe-straddling diaspora and increasingly multiracial population, Irish literary expatriation appears likely to continue into the future though it will take new directions. World-facing expatriate novels can contribute usefully to the development of more internationalist-minded readerships and can stimulate rather than retard the domestic novel. However, it is never easy to surmount inherited ways of seeing the world and literature competes with stronger media that are corporate-owned or dominated by the leading states. The novel cannot create the world anew, then, but at its best can cultivate more worldly readers willing to think and act anew.

Ireland has a long history of expatriate writers yet the subject has attracted little critical attention. Forms and meanings of expatriation have changed over time but the fact of expatriation has remained consistent. Daniel Corkery, a leading early twentieth-century critic, deemed expatriation an obstacle to the development of a robust domestic national literature; today, it is more likely to be positively valued as a sign of outward-looking worldliness. The introduction examines changing conceptions and contours of Irish literary expatriation and situates the Irish experience between metropolitan Anglo-American and Anglophone postcolonial instances. Exploring how the Irish novel engages with realigning economic and literary world systems, the study examines Irish narrative constructions of the United States, Asia, the Global South and Europe.

Extending and challenging Pascale Casanova’s account of world literary systems in The World Republic of Letters, this chapter argues that after World War I American and Irish writers boldly remade the world literary system long dominated by Paris and London. In the context of European imperial decline and emerging American ascendancy, American and Irish émigré writers produced dazzling new works that challenged the authority of London and Paris to establish literary value. After World II, Paris remained a strong but considerably weaker cultural capital, and New York assumed London’s former position as the major capital of the Anglophone literary world. During the Cold War, an assertive American literary establishment repurposed the literature that had once challenged English and French literary authority to boost the global cultural prestige of the United States and contest Soviet conceptions of “world literature.”