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.

This chapter assesses Wallace Stevens’s relationship and relevance to world literature under Pascale Casanova’s rubric of the “two orders,” political and aesthetic, that constitute the “world literary space.” Jenkins’s chapter argues that Stevens’s involvement in the global cultural marketplace and his defense of poetic autonomy, his projection of his poetry as a world in itself, are not incompatible but mutually constitutive of his complex relationship to world literature. The chapter explores Stevens’s orientalism and his reception, in translation, in contemporary Chinese poetry and in the Anglophone world poetries of Kashmiri American and Iranian American poets Agha Shahid Ali and Roger Sedarat. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Stevens’s significance, in translation, for contemporary Italian poets like Valerio Magrelli, and of his mixed reception in postwar British and Irish poetry.

Extending and challenging Pascale Casanova’s account of world literary systems in The World Republic of Letters, this chapter argues that after World War I American and Irish writers boldly remade the world literary system long dominated by Paris and London. In the context of European imperial decline and emerging American ascendancy, American and Irish émigré writers produced dazzling new works that challenged the authority of London and Paris to establish literary value. After World II, Paris remained a strong but considerably weaker cultural capital, and New York assumed London’s former position as the major capital of the Anglophone literary world. During the Cold War, an assertive American literary establishment repurposed the literature that had once challenged English and French literary authority to boost the global cultural prestige of the United States and contest Soviet conceptions of “world literature.”