Famine, home, and transatlantic politics in two late nineteenth-century Irish-American novels

Abstract

This article analyzes the continuing tensions and influences between political and nationalist self-representations of the Irish in the USA and the Irish in Ireland in James Doran's Zanthon and John Brennan's Erin Mor. As this essay shows, the ostensibly Irish (nationalist) ideologies of these texts are fundamentally transatlantic by nature. They are projected as an interface between Irish nationalism, current American affairs and politics, and British imperial ideology. As such, these texts construct a liminal discourse of transatlantic Irish nationalism, creating an intermediary discursive space between host country, home, and Empire. Instead of merely describing the Irish diaspora as a community of exiles or a victim diaspora, these works of fiction show that through the infusion or appropriation of North American ideals, the Irish nation could be (re)forged, at home or abroad. Moreover, on a more thematic level, both Doran and Brennan's political philosophies interact with political ideologies of the late 1880s and early 1890s, elaborating their own takes on the interrelations between the rhetoric of liberty and economic policy central to the political debate in the USA during the latter part of the nineteenth century. With their double message for both the USA and Ireland, these texts thus forge a genuinely transatlantic Irish transnationalism.