Representations of race are intimately bound to representations of the struggle for freedom and autonomy, made more complex by focusing on novels written by women. These representations of race in Irish women’s literature challenge the ability of Irish women to achieve independence alongside rather than against the colonized peoples of the nineteenth-century Irish literary landscape. From Sydney Owenson to Kate O’Brien, from the Act of Union to Ireland’s independence and its joining the European Economic Community, the way in which Irish women’s fiction has defined freedom has depended upon a politics of race, a politics that is sometimes sympathetic and rooted in affective anti-imperialism, and other times is a politics of denial and erasure. If studies of Irish women’s literature is to contend fully with the history of race, we must be attuned to these politics even, or especially, if the narratives of self-fulfilment and independence become the objects of critique.

This chapter examines Donal Ryan’s From A Low and Quiet Sea (2018), Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life (2018), and Correspondences (2019). These three publications offer insight into the directions being taken by contemporary Irish literature to address the absence of Black and minority ethnic peoples from Irish literature. Despite an ongoing boom in Irish publishing that has seen the global success of many authors, Irish literature continues to demonstrate a preoccupation with notions of Irishness rooted in the Irish literary Revival of the turn of the twentieth century. This essay questions the continuing whiteness of Irish literature through an examination of two recent exceptions in Irish publishing, which, in their inclusion of people of color, challenge comfortable notions of what Irish literature comprises. These texts force readers to confront issues of silencing and traumatic cultural absence for people of color in Ireland, raising important questions about a contemporary Ireland that is often congratulated for its liberal-mindedness.

This chapter offers a study of some key developments in Irish realism from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. The Irish novel in a variety of forms, including the bildungsroman, the family novel, the expatriate novel and political fiction, has developed significantly in this period and its highest achievements are distinguished by memorable characterisation, probing social critique, and lyrical writing. Stressing issues of form, style, and affect as well as content, the study examines a selection of Irish fictions, urban and rural, domestic and overseas, northern and southern, and considers their relationship to wider and ongoing changes in Irish society in recent times.