This chapter explores reconfigurations of traditional national identities in the short fiction of Edna O’ Brien, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mary O'Donnell, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's observations about selfhood and Otherness, the author demonstrates that these writers frequently use the figure of the immigrant in order to scrutinise, in the postnational context of Ireland, the shattering of conventional notions about self, family, and community. As the author shows, the immigrant never appears as an isolated motif in fictional portrayals of contemporary Ireland. Rather, the description of such a character tends to be linked with incisive explorations of contemporary Irishness.

This chapter acknowledges the gendered dimensions of Irish multiculturality by specifically addressing the connections between ethnicity, race, and gender. The author offers a feminist reading of anti-racism in her analysis of Clare Boylan's Black Baby, a novel which explores capitalism, patriarchy, and racism as interlocked systems of oppression. As the author convincingly demonstrates, Boylan's 1988 novel can be viewed as a precursor to current writing on race and ethnicity in twenty-first century Ireland. Black Baby, this contributor argues, reconceptualised race in a pioneering way, by considering its constitutive role in any serious attempt to undo the colonisation of Irish women.

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 chapter discusses how critics have argued about the ways in which Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 sets it in the contexts of debates about modernism and postmodernism. The novel engages more generally with contemporary culture and politics. The chapter first explores the ways in which Oedipa's and other characters' identities become central to the generation of meaning in the narrative. Then, it discusses the ways in which Pynchon's writing self-consciously raises questions about meaning and interpretation more generally. The chapter focuses on a particular model of projection presented in the novel to analyse the ways in which Oedipa's attempts at interpretation brings her to the verge of collapse as the narrative nears its end. Finally, it examines the ways in which readers might be able to engage with its refusal to provide definitive answers to the questions it raises about representation and reality.

This chapter focuses on transculturality and recent Irish poetry. In its exploration of the hitherto under-researched poetry of Dermot Bolger and the recent work produced by other poets such as Mary O'Malley, David Wheatley, and Pat Boran, this chapter analyses the ways in which the immigrant experience is interpreted through the lenses of Ireland's shared transcultural experiences of exile, homelessness, and homesickness. This contribution also focuses on lesser known literary voices such as Betty Keogh, Eileen Casey, Siobhan Daffy, and Adenice Adedoyin, whose poems explore, in various ways, Julia Kristeva's realisation that we are ultimately all ‘strangers to ourselves.’

The controversy surrounding migrant mothers constitutes one of the most important thematic threads in Emer Martin's 2007 novel Baby Zero. This contribution carefully studies this novel in order to examine the often invisible and neglected interrelations between gender difference and contemporary multiethnicity in Ireland. The transnational aspect of Martin's fiction is here brought to the surface as a helpful frame of critical analysis of the intersections between gender and race in both Western and non-Western countries.

This chapter analyses the depiction of immigrants in Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger novels, revealing – like the previous chapters – the existence of diverse literary responses to multiethnicity in Ireland. The author identifies an evolution in the Irish novels published between 2000 and 2010. In those novels published in the initial years of the new millennium, such as those by Mary Rose Callaghan, Elizabeth Wassell, and Anne Haverty, immigrants appear in the background, as secondary characters coexisting – but not interacting actively – with the main Irish protagonists. It is not until a few years later, in the novels published by Chris Binchy, Peter Cunningham, and Hugo Hamilton, that immigrants acquire a voice of their own in the texts, and genuine interculturality between Irish-born and non-Irish born characters is presented as a possibility.

Some contemporary Irish writers put into practice a historical remembrance, in their need to establish specific points of connection between the reality of the newcomers and previous Irish nationals emigrating from the homeland. This chapter demonstrates in its examination of Dermot Bolger's Ballymun Trilogy how present multiculturalism in Ireland can be efficiently described in literary terms through the perspective of the country's long history of emigration. In his play The Townlands of Brazil, Bolger expresses his sympathy for the foreigner through his insistence upon the commonality of experience with Ireland's diasporic history.

This chapter examines the reconceptualisation of stable definitions of individual and collective identities in its critical assessment of Hugo Hamilton's two most recent novels, Disguise and Hand in the Fire. The author starts by exposing the limits of the concept of the ‘migrant nation’ defended in the mid 1990s by Kearney and the then president Mary Robinson, as such a concept runs the risk of reinforcing an ethnocultural base to definitions of Irish national identity. The author shows how such a monological understanding of collective identity is debunked in Hamilton's writings, which openly exercise what Ronit Lentin (2001a) calls a ‘politics of interrogation’ of conventional definitions of Irishness.

The purpose of this introduction is to provide a preliminary exploration of the terminology, issues, and questions which will later become central to the chapters that follow. A brief overview of the essays gathered in the collection is offered in the penultimate section.

This chapter explores Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice in terms of the ideas, imagery, styles and themes of Pynchon's work that the authors have discussed so far. In other words, they take the idea of 'Pynchon Lite' as a starting point and assess the extent to which such an idea might help them approach Pynchon's work as a whole. After a brief introduction to the novel itself, the chapter compares it with his earlier works (V. and Gravity's Rainbow) with which it has generally been unfavourably contrasted by reviewers. Then, the chapter compares it with the other two Californian novels (The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland) that share a number of thematic and historical concerns. Finally, the chapter compares it with his more recent novels (Mason & Dixon and Against the Day), which some reviewers seem to find wilfully obscure in comparison to his last work.

This chapter explores the impact of anarchy as a strategy for disrupting the coherencies of ideology, those of politics and of reading. Within Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, anarchist activity is a rife, as several characters attempt to resist the inexorable march of capitalism, and anarchist violence is felt across the world. The novel combines an explicit attentiveness to spatial and temporal forms, investing in both categories as viable politicised modes of experience. Against the Day, with its self-conscious awareness of science-fiction conventions and time-travelling possibilities, offers up a challenge to linearity's dominance. Narrative digressions, pronounced shifts backwards and forwards in time and across space, and transitions into dream-worlds ensure a reading experience that is bereft of the reassurances of linear progression.

This chapter problematises Irish multiculturalism through its analysis of the contemporary fiction of Irish-born writers Roddy Doyle, Claire Keegan and Emma Donohue, and immigrant author Cauvery Madhavan. It maintains that there are two ways of representing multiculturalism in Ireland: as an ‘obstacle’ that can be easily overcome by the hospitality, friendliness, and goodwill of Irish people, or as ‘a complicated and unresolved process,’ which leads to cultural anxiety and conflict. Whereas Doyle and Keegan adopt the first stance on the matter, by minimising the problems posed by Irish multiculturalism, Donohue and Madhavan offer a more complex representation of cross-cultural encounters which better reflects the difficulties experienced by immigrants today. In this sense, for the author of this chapter, the most contested issue in current multicultural representations is not who speaks and from which perspective, but rather how the interaction between the Irish and the immigrants is represented.

This chapter examined work by Sinéad Morrissey, Mary O'Malley, and Leontia Flynn, revealing how these female poets use their personal experiences of global mobility to achieve a better understanding of modern Irish multicultural society. The latter part of this chapter analyses Michael Hayes's daring attempt to record the daily life of asylum-seekers in ‘Survivor’ – Representations of the ‘New Irish,’ coauthored with the African artist Jean ‘Ryan’ Hakizimana. By placing his poems beside Hakizimana's paintings, Hayes opens up an intercultural dialogue between cultures and traditions which genuinely reflects the hybridisation and polyphony of Irish society nowadays.