A Context for Joyce : Seumas O'Kelly, Daniel Corkery, and the Nationalist View of the Irish Expatriate

Abstract

Early in the twentieth century, James Joyce and George Moore were, in the realm of Irish fiction, the best-known proponents of exile as the means by which individuals could realize their fullest potential. But some fiction writers — most notably Seumas O'Kelly and Daniel Corkery — had a decidedly different view. They felt that Ireland's worsening political, economic, and social paralysis actually called for an end to the practice that drained the nation of its youth and vitality. Those Irish men and women of farsighted vision and enterprising spirit, in their view, ought instead to remain at home to aid their motherland. As a result, exiles in the fiction of such writers never fare well, and eventually an antiromantic image of exile emerges as part of a conscious effort on the part of these writers to counteract the romantic view held by Joyce and Moore.