Chapter Four - Elusive Europes

Summary

The European Union has reshaped Irish society over the past half-century, yet in Irish fiction Europe typically appears as a site of aesthetic discovery or historical trauma rather than as immediate political reality. Contemporary Irish writing belongs more to an Anglo-American than to a European literary sphere, and Irish novels in Europe often ponder the ‘Americanization’ of European and Irish modernity. Aidan Higgins’s Balcony of Europe and Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone depict Irish expatriates exploring what it means to live between Europe and the United States. In both narratives, the protagonists are romantically involved with Americans and attached to European landscapes, yet neither émigré finds some sustaining new local or supranational sociopolitical form beyond the nation-state.