In response to some critics of contemporary Irish culture who have lamented the loss of Irish cultural distinctiveness, particularly in language use, this chapter draws on research in the sociolinguistics of globalization to argue for an alternative method of reading language in fiction. Rather than focusing exclusively on fixed language identities, it suggests a method of reading for the modes and values of expression that are produced by linguistic mobility, neoliberalism, and technology. The chapter considers this changing status of language as it appears in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, including the ways in which economic globalization has prioritized language as a skill and a commodity while reinventing its function through technology. The chapter argues that Rooney’s and Dolan’s novels dramatize the shift from a fixed language identity to a global one based on the idea of linguistic resources in a way that leaves their characters in ambivalent relationships to Irishness, the English language, and globalization.

This chapter provides a sketch of the representation of feminist subjectivity in literature from the mid-1990s to the present. I adopt a survey approach to consider the Tiger period’s representation of subjective alienation, while focusing in more specifically on the work of four post-Tiger writers – Sally Rooney, Nancy Harris, Melatu Okorie, and Alvy Carragher – to analyze the intricacies of their constructions of subjectivity. Through this analysis, the chapter explores how the solo voices of critique morph into conversational exchange, as the post-Tiger feminist literary landscape establishes vital links between embodied subjectivity and digital space in complex constructions of “biodigital subjectivity” (a term I draw from Aristea Fotopoulou) to establish a networked subject that is simultaneously (and contradictorily) empowered and rendered intensely vulnerable in the risky terrain of technologically mediated life. I conclude with a brief analysis of how this type of networked paradigm is at play in the public feminist activisms of post-Tiger Irish culture, especially in examples of literary feminisms that engender critiques of collective resistance in powerful calls for change.