Reviews
Pearson is convincing in arguing that Irish writers often straddle the space between national identity and a sense of belonging to a larger, more cosmopolitan environment.
--Choice
[An] admirable book . . . Repositions the artistic subject as something different from the biographical Joyce, Bowen, or Beckett, cohering as a series of particular aesthetic responses to the dilemma of belonging in an Irish context.
--James Joyce Broadsheet
A smart and compelling approach to Irish expatriate modernism. . . . An important new book that will have a lasting impact on postcolonial Irish studies.
--Breac
Demonstrat[es]. . .just what it is that makes comparative readings of history, politics, literature, theory, and culture indispensable to the work that defines what is best and most relevant about scholarship in the humanities today.
--Modern Fiction Studies
Navigates the choppy waters of the development of the modern Irish writer, as epitomized by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett. . . . It is a scholarly treatise, yet lends itself to the average reader who wants to increase his/her knowledge of Irish literature.
--Book Look
A hopeful and beautifully compelling book.
--James Joyce Literary Supplement
Persuasively advances many of the more expansive perspectives of postcolonial studies, without adopting a fully postnational viewpoint, and thus offers an important contribution not just to Irish studies but also to the study of literary cosmopolitanism and modernism more broadly.
--Twentieth-Century Literature
Pearson’s readings . . . are savvy in their insights into the uses and abuses made of Irish history, even as they clarify the contradictions that reside at the heart of Irish national and postcolonial concepts of statehood.
--James Joyce Quarterly