Transatlantic connections in John McGahern’s The Leavetaking

John McGahern is most often regarded as an artist of the local or the “self-enclosed world”, as Declan Kiberd puts it. His works explore the lives and loves of characters in settings that correspond closely with the localities of McGahern’s youth in the north-west of Ireland. Accordingly, the themes of his work are often aligned with those of other “provincial” Irish realists, in Kavanagh’s sense of the word: religion, exile, and local identities or selves. This paper, however, focuses on instances where McGahern contrasts the self with the non-self in distinct national-cultural terms. Specifically, in The Leavetaking, as well as the short stories “Doorways” and “Bank Holiday”, he introduces American characters (women in all three cases) as much, it would seem, to provide the spark of a love-interest for those stories’ drifting male protagonists as to provide a commentary on Ireland by way of comparison with America and American perceptions of Ireland. In doing so, McGahern deploys a transatlantic vocabulary of circulation and movement that reflects the openness of his enclosed locality to the non-local, the self to the non-self.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Irish Studies Review on 2022-02-09, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09670882.2022.2037269

This fulltext is available in Aug. 2023.