Transnationalism and the Short Story: Emma Donoghue's Astray

Transnationalism and the Short Story: Emma Donoghue’s Astray (2012) Emigration and exile are well-established themes in Irish short fiction. From George Moore over Séan O’Faolain and Liam O’Flaherty to Colm Toíbín and Donal Ryan: many Irish writers have explored the pains and losses involved in migration, both for those who leave and for those who stay. Irish-American authors too have frequently explored this topic: think of the stories of Maeve Brennan, Colum McCann or Gerard Donovan. It came as no surprise then that the Irish-Canadian writer, Emma Donoghue, devoted an entire short story collection to the theme of emigration, focusing on “travels to, within, and occasionally from the United States and Canada”, as she puts it in the “Afterword” to the collection. As in her earlier short story collection, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), the stories are all inspired by historical evidence and imaginatively reconstruct the lives of ‘real’ migrants in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. This paper proposes to explore Donoghue’s take on these transnational migrations against the background of the long tradition of representing emigration in the Irish short story. Unlike many of her predecessors, in fact, Donoghue does not so much focus on loss, nostalgia or the migrant’s hyphenated existence, but rather on the way transnational border-crossing seems to involve the transgression of other boundaries, norms and codes as well: sometimes in a positive or liberating sense as when migration allows the protagonist in “Daddy’s Girl” to subvert gender codes, at other times in a negative sense when the mercenaries brought over from Europe to fight in the American civil war commit the most horrific crimes. The paper will also explore how Donoghue crosses generic boundaries in her own fiction: the stories present a mixture of fiction and fact (often uneasily grounded by the acknowledgements at the end of each story) and the book as a whole takes the hybrid form of a short story cycle, mid-way between the collection and the novel.status: publishe