Vol. 36.1 (2025)

Research in literary and cultural studies on Irish communities and communities in Ireland has recently shifted its focus from the traditional -and partially stereotypicalrural, regional, and religious small-town community of colonial times, as evoked in Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) and Jane Barlow's Irish Idylls (1892), to multidimensional communities in a glocal world.As Marisol Morales Ladrn and Juan F. Elices Agudo observe, "[t]he well-known construction of a rural Ireland, whose image of the pastoral ideal was spread worldwide for centuries, has given way to its recognition as one of the most globalised nations in the western world" (2011, 1).Recent publications take, for example, transcultural (Barros-del Ro 2024), postnational (Haekel 2020), or transnational approaches to the island's literature and culture (Tucker and Casey 2014), including such cultural products' engagements with Ireland's manifold communities.Generally, Irish studies have become interested in the multiple transformations within the Republic, in its relationships to the Irish diaspora and Northern Irish communities, and in new approaches to Irish cultural identities.Increasingly, Irishness is understood as a hybrid and diverse phenomenon and Irish culture is, in Morales Ladrn and Elices Agudo's phrasing, a "hybrid culture both -and at the same time -local and global" (2011, 3).In the second half of the 20 th century, the process of modernisation and the promise of modernity 1 challenged long-established ideas of alterity and group belonging, disrupting traditions and evoking a departure from cultural narratives of Irish exceptionalism.The reverberations and discourses accompanying the social, political, and economic caesuras since the 1970s firmly placed both the Republic and Northern Ireland in a globalised world, highlighting how Irish communities and (their) identities are formed through cultural practices on a regional, national, and transnational level.1 Modernity and modernisation are highly ambiguous concepts in Ireland (for an overview of different conceptualisations, see Cleary 2005).The term 'modernity' does not relate to the modern era in this particular context but rather alludes to an apparent paradigm shift in late 20 th -century Ireland.The Western paradigm of modernity and its metanarratives then seemed to stand in diametrical opposition to the former Irish "pessimism derived from a feeling of stasis" (O'Toole 2021, 246) and the understanding of the past as 'tradition.'These ideas were also related to "a paradoxical lack of confidence in the existential condition of Ireland," to rural communities, and to colonial times (2021, 246; see Appadurai 2010; see Huber 2023 for a discussion of White Western modernity and Irishness in the early 21 st century).The Celtic Tiger period, in particular, was marked by a tension between this notion of tradition and the idea of rapid modernisation, which seemed to promise the severing of Ireland's ties to the past through a progressive trajectory and a full entrance into the community of global Europe (see O'