This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the ways in which postmodernity, and its embrace of epistemological, ethical and ontological aporia, is put to work in the service of profound reflections on the political possibilities of narrative. Fifty years after the publication of his first novel, V., in 1963, Thomas Pynchon remains the most elusive and important writer of American postmodernity. America's 'fork in the road' inscribes the failure of the nation's promise and the potential for its progressive reconstitution. However, such a vision of the future is always prone to incursion by the solidifying forces of reaction. Within the dialectic of freedom and constraint, Pynchon's characters find themselves in networks of signification which they struggle to understand, but which urges them to make connections and establish forms of relationship.

Gravity's Rainbow has frequently been described by critics as Thomas Pynchon's most complex, challenging and experimental novel. This chapter explores Pynchon's critique of the anti-foundationalism of contemporary culture and identity. It examines the uses that Gravity's Rainbow makes of the multiple modes and genres of representation to produce a narrative form that simultaneously constructs, embraces and challenges the disorientation of postmodern experience. Just as it is to the characters existing in the Zone, the idea of physical, metaphorical, symbolic and narratological movement is central to the reader's experience of the novel. Gravity's Rainbow's depictions of identity, war, desire and the possibility of a radically different future challenge many of the systems of political and historical sense-making which readers might recognise. It is a novel that is fundamentally interested in understanding the complexities and contradictions of the power structures of the post-war world.

In its detailed assessment of the presence of white Irish-born playwrights in the development of community arts in Ireland, this chapter suggests the problematics involved in negotiating the authors’ whiteness in relation to the minority communities in Ireland. Irish-born playwrights such as Donal O'Kelly, Declan Gorman, and Charlie O'Neill must confront the ethical question of how to speak convincingly on issues concerning migration and racism, as individuals belonging to the privileged ‘white’ and ‘native’ majority of Ireland. As the author implies, they manage to avoid the pitfalls involved in such a task by infusing their work with a political activism which is built on previous paradigms of social and community engagement. Furthermore, community arts work fosters genuine interculturality through the cooperation and interaction on stage of ethnically diverse individuals.

This chapter delves into the numerous, complex ways of representing multiculturalism in Ireland from the perspective of Irish poets. It starts by briefly assessing the work of an immigrant poet from Poland, Kinga Olszewska, in order to consider it alongside recent poems by Colette Bryce, Mary O'Donnell, and Michael O'Loughlin. These writers are interested in deriding and/or debunking the ideal ‘liberal’ model of Irish multiculturalism, which often permeates literary and cultural texts in their uncritical celebration of a truly integrated and unconditionally hospitable Ireland. Bryce, for instance, discloses the patronising and xenophobic attitudes behind official discourses in Ireland, in a poem which suggestively recalls the 2004 Citizenship Referendum. Bryce's blatant critique of an ideal multicultural Ireland is also recorded by O'Donnell and O'Loughlin, who, in different ways, explore multiethnicity from the viewpoint of the centre and that of the periphery.

In this overview of Roddy Doyle’s fictional and theatrical contributions, this chapter demonstrates how Irishness is, in his work, redefined in order to include hyphenated, hybridised identities. In particular, the author explores the issue of citizenship in Doyle’s short story ‘57% Irish,’ revealing the political and ideological nuances of a text which openly vindicates the integration of the ‘new Irish’ in Ireland’s mainstream society.

This contribution reflects on the ways in which Irishness is enacted and conveyed in recent literary articulations of multiculturality. In this essay on contemporary Irish poets Derek Mahon, Sinéad Morrissey, Mary O'Donnell, and Seamus Heaney, the author focuses on the ways in which clichéd versions of identity are projected in relation to tourism in Ireland. Their poems on tourism can be studied comparatively with other more explicit literary discussions of immigration, as they also reveal interesting cross-cultural views and prejudices in the encounter between the Irish host and the foreign Other.

This chapter explores Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., in terms of some of the key categories critics have assigned to it. In particular, it reads the novel as engaging with the ideas of modernism, postmodernism, intertextuality, and parody with which Pynchon's early work has so frequently been associated. A series of readings of V. take their point of departure as the identification of Pynchon's parodic response to the literary, artistic and the political ideas associated with modernism in many of the book's historical episodes. The chapter explores the ways in which V. stages, first, the disintegration of the humanist subject and, second, the crises of identity, gender and knowledge that emerge from this process. It also examines the ways in which these challenges are present at the conclusion of the novel's narrative.

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).