Migrations in Irish Society and Literature: New Worlds, New Words

This book addresses the issue of migration to and from Ireland since the 17th-18th century and examines the dynamics of emigration and immigration down to the present day. It is distinctive in its pluri-disciplinary approach of migrating issues in Ireland as well as the way it confronts individual and collective dynamics in the context of migration. It offers a comprehensive and englobing understanding of key issues of migration in Ireland today and their legal, social and linguistic impacts, while also focusing on the representations of the migrating experience in literature, be it in poetry or in fiction.

In doing so it also aims at reassessing issues of home, place-making and belonging. The book goes beyond the study of immigration and emigration (from a historical or economic approach) but rather demonstrates the complexity of migrating trajectories, whether individual or collective, and how those migrating stories are inscribed within national and supra-national dynamics. The study of the words used to narrate those experiences offers insight into the plurality of migrating experiences, hence the place devoted in this book to literary representations.

Marie Mianowski’s research focuses on the representations of place, place-making and landscape issues in an Irish context. She is the editor of Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts (Palgrave, 2012), and the author of a monograph Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction (Routledge, 2017). She has co-edited several books on migration and published many chapters and articles on the above themes.

Véronique Molinari is a Professor of British and Irish history. Her research focuses on the Victorian and Edwardian women’s movement in Britain and Ireland and on the various forms of women’s political participation in British and Irish politics. As co-founder of the project ＂Migrations, Borders and International Relations＂ of her research centre ILCEA4, she has dedicated a large part of her research to the issue of female emigration from Britain and Ireland. Her publications include: ＂The Emigration of Irish Famine Orphan Girls to Australia: The Earl Grey Scheme＂ in Marie Ruiz (Ed.), International Migrations in the Victorian Era, Studies in Global Migration History, (Brill, 2018) and ＂ A Most ’Valuable Class’ The Shetland Female Emigration Society and the Emigration of Single Women to South Australia and Tasmania in the early 1850s＂ in Northern Scotland, Volume 16, Issue 1 (May 2025).