Ways of Escape

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter revises critical readings of the Irish big house tradition and addresses, within the context of late modernism, the related category of ‘small house’ affectations. It asks how this spatial shift of emphasis helped to sustain Ireland as an imagined—and indeed, literal—retreat for a jaded wartime English sensibility, and how this reconfiguration lends itself to a political reading of neutral Ireland’s function as a figurative antechamber for England’s late imperial desire for ‘small nationhood’. The chapter assesses various representations of Ireland as the site of a time-locked minimalism, a theme encouraged by English film and travel writing, and by several novelists, including the two studied closely in this chapter, Evelyn Waugh, whose inclinations to an Irish escape indicate a protest at the left-wing statist turn in the English political landscape, and Graham Greene, whose 1940s retreat to Achill Island (including contact with retired Irish revolutionary Ernie O’Malley) is read as a figurative shedding of an overburdened imperial sensibility.