Glocal Ireland

Book excerpt: The transformations undergone by Ireland in the last decades have relocated the country within that liminal space of the local and the global. The country of the deeply-rooted rural traditions, the severely religious impositions and the fragile economic system became in the 1990s a world referent due to its unprecedented and impressive growth. However, the emergence of the so-called Celtic Tiger and the recognition that Ireland had become one of the most globalised nations in the Western world met a dramatic downfall that has left the country (pre)occupied with matters concerning its re-positioning and re-definition within a wider European framework. The cultural and artistic productivity of this nation has also moved away from the topical insularity of the past, adopting more transnational and universal subjects, at the same time that it has struggled to retain its genuine values and its own signs of identity. For, in Ireland, the more this global progress has grown to be unavoidable, the more evocatively the local has befallen. Therefore, the editors of this volume contend that the global and the local should be understood not as opposed concepts but as two ends of a continuum of interaction. Within this state of affairs, this volume comprises a series of articles that revolve around the issue of glocality in Irish literature, culture and cinema in order to disentangle the complexities that underlie this concept and which are inextricably related to the drastic changes undertaken by Ireland in the years before and after the economic boom and posterior bailout.