‘The Secret Dotted Line’

This chapter explores the ways in which Irish writers have self-consciously invoked Irish-American return and/or the roots journey to address questions of literary genealogy. In other words, this chapter discusses narratives in which a thematic preoccupation with return also underwrites metafictional concerns with literary forebears, the Irish literary tradition and artistic exile. Exploring texts that span 1960 to 2008 and the work of prolific, exiled writers Brian Moore (1921-1999) and Edna O’Brien (b. 1930) as well as the much younger writer Denis Kehoe (b. 1978), this chapter configures ‘return’ in multiple senses: the literal returns of fictional characters to Ireland; return as ‘restoration’ (of occluded histories; of banned books); and return as an opportunity to engage with (literary) genealogies that do not conform to the gendered and heteronormative orthodoxies of the Irish literary tradition.