Negotiating between Traditional Irishness and Modern Global Identities

The end of the Celtic Tiger period as well as Britain's decision to leave the EU, which also significantly influenced life on the Emerald Isle, prompted a reevaluation of Irish national identity as well as of the country's role in a European or even more global context.Since literature as well as other cultural products play a crucial role in these deliberations, this article investigates the depiction of Irish communities in post-Celtic Tiger and post-Brexit fiction.It reads the two novels The Butchers (2020) by Ruth Gilligan and Audrey Magee's The Colony (2022) as case studies of what can be referred to as 'narratives of glocal Irish community.'In order to do so, this contribution draws on Benedict Anderson's 'imagined communities' as well as Sandra Zagarell's concept of 'narratives of community' and combines them with an approach that also takes into consideration the glocal context which shapes modern Ireland.Although not set in the present but at the onset of the increasing influence of globalisation on Irish communities (the 1970s in the case of The Colony and the 1990s for The Butchers), the two historical fictions reflect as much on the current state of the nation as they do on the past.A key focus of the analysis lies on how these texts negotiate between traditional notions of rural Irishness and the identities connected to a modern European or global Ireland.