“Or am I seeking home?”: Arrivals, Departures, and/or Returns as Identity-Shaping Experiences in Contemporary (Non-)Irish Women’s Literature

Abstract

A land historically marked by the sorrows of astonishingly numerous (in-voluntary) “emigrants” and/or “exiles”, in recent decades Ireland has also undergone remarkably significant waves of immigration and return migration, which have inevitably questioned the nature of “true Irishness” today. Drawing on fictional and non-fictional narratives of metaphorical and/or literal (e)migration produced by the contemporary generation of (non-)Irish women writers, this paper aims to shed light on the personal and national implications related to a woman’s “decision”/“necessity” to seek, leave, and/or return to a “new” home away from home, and therefore to her attempt to “reconcile” with or forge her identity/ies and ambivalent longing and sense of (not) belonging elsewhere or within an ever-changing Ireland.