Riding the celtic tiger: Anne Enright’s The Gathering and globalizing the contemporary Irish novel

Concomitant with the rise of neoliberalism, Booker prize winning novels, since the 1980s, have consistently mediated global awareness of national contexts within a globalised economy. This paper will discuss the globalization of literature through the celebrity status of the Booker prize. It focuses, in particular, on the contemporary Irish writer, Anne Enright and her 2007 Booker prize novel, The Gathering. I will argue that the ephemeral nature of the text, expressed through the intimate details of the domestic, the psychological and familial, appear at odds with the contemporary national preoccupation with excessive materialism, consumerism and overspending. Does Ireland’s relationship to global economic conditions reflect national, cultural and social pathologies reflected in its literature? Does globally recognized Irish literature represent an alternative vision of Ireland that resists the vicissitudes of the global economy, even while these images depend on global forces? If Enright’s novel gained international fame just as Ireland teetered on the cusp of economic decline, then I suggest that the novel resists this by recuperating and celebrating the rich legacy of Irish literary culture, and indeed, Irish culture more broadly. The text becomes a site of contradictory images of Ireland, asserting a timelessness that is paradoxically reaffirmed only by the novel’s timely emergence onto an international scene only too conscious of Ireland’s economic woes