Chapter One - After America

Summary

This chapter considers the impact of what Mark McGurl has called ‘the Program Era’ on recent Irish fiction. It tracks the emergence of a new kind of Irish novel moving back and forth across the Atlantic between Ireland and the United States. Taking Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic and Mary Costello’s Academy Street as examples, the chapter proposes that these works indicate the gravitational force of American cultural and economic supremacy in ‘the Program Era’ as the United States has drawn Irish writing into its orbit. However, even as the Irish Transatlantic novel attests to some convergences of Irish and American realities, the form also hints at an autumn or early winter of American global hegemony.