Ireland has a long history of expatriate writers yet the subject has attracted little critical attention. Forms and meanings of expatriation have changed over time but the fact of expatriation has remained consistent. Daniel Corkery, a leading early twentieth-century critic, deemed expatriation an obstacle to the development of a robust domestic national literature; today, it is more likely to be positively valued as a sign of outward-looking worldliness. The introduction examines changing conceptions and contours of Irish literary expatriation and situates the Irish experience between metropolitan Anglo-American and Anglophone postcolonial instances. Exploring how the Irish novel engages with realigning economic and literary world systems, the study examines Irish narrative constructions of the United States, Asia, the Global South and Europe.