'My passport's green': Irishness in the new world order (Northern Ireland, James Ryan, Colm Toibin, Eoin McNamee, Robert McLiam Wilson, Frank McCourt)

This dissertation attends to the category of Irishness as it is expanded by developments both political and cultural: e.g., the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, an increasingly engaged diasporic population, the transformations wrought by the European Union, globalization and the Americanization of Irishness, and a thriving Irish literary and cultural renaissance. Examining a pair of contemporary Irish novels---James Ryan's Home from England (1995) and Colm Toibin's The Heather Blazing (1992)---the study begins by assessing a transitional socio-cultural moment in which historically overinvested identities are challenged, and only haltingly yield to a shifting, more malleable sense of Irishness. The middle two chapters consider contemporary Northern Irish literature, examining the hybrid inheritance of the province's citizenry in the contexts of genre, space, and the peace process. Looking first at Eoin McNamee's novel, Resurrection Man (1994), I argue that the "Troubles thriller" genre only rarely approaches the contemporary political conflict in the North with any degree of complexity, and too often seems willfully to ignore the reality that Northern Ireland is in fact a highly differentiated society. As the genre mutates in response to the peace process, however, it becomes capable of enacting a discursive and spatial desegregation: I thus propose that the liberating cartography at work in a novel such as Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street (1996) delivers on the latent promise of the North by providing a model for tolerance and multi-ethnic inclusiveness. The final chapter examines Irishness as it emerges from the limitations of reductive binaries and the destructiveness of tribal atavisms. Tracking its movements in the commercial circuits of U.S. global hegemony, though, I suggest that the apparently heightened malleability of Irishness represents only an ambiguous emancipation. Focusing on Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996), and especially on this memoir's immense appeal for American readers, I locate the particular types of Irishness that populate the American imagination. Mindful that Irishness is less than ever a fixed referent and, in turn, diversely mobilized, the study concludes by asking how such mobilizations can be used productively rather than merely consumed.