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.
About the Author: Marisol Morales Ladron is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary English and Irish Literature at the University of Alcala, Madrid, Spain. Her main area of research is Irish literature and she currently chairs the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI). She is also interested in gender studies and in the interrelationship between literature and psychology. Her publications include the books Breve introduccion a la literatura comparada (University of Alcala, 1999) and Las poeticas de James Joyce y Luis Martin-Santos (Peter Lang, 2005). She edited the volume Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies (Netbiblo, 2007) and co-edited two volumes on feminist criticism: Mosaicos y taraceas: Desconstruccion feminista de los discursos del genero (University of Acala, 2000) and (Trans)formaciones de las sexualidades y el genero (University of Alcala, 2001). She has published articles on a variety of English and Irish authors which have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Papers on Joyce, Irish University Review, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, Atlantis, Exemplaria, BABEL Afial, EJES, Estudios de Filologia Moderna, Bells, Estudios irlandeses and Odisea. Juan F. Elices Agudo is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Director of the Language Centre at the University of Alcala, Madrid, Spain. He completed his PhD dissertation with honours entitled Realism and Satire in William Boyd's Narrative Production in 2003. He has published extensively on contemporary English and Irish literature, focusing primarily on aspects related to satire, dystopia and postcolonial fiction. He is a founding member of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI) and is the author of several books, namely El realismo magico en lengua inglesa: tres ensayos (together with Fernando Galvan and Jose Santiago Fernandez; Alcala de Henares, 2001), Historical and Theoretical Approaches to English Satire (Lincom Europa, 2004) and The Satiric Universe of William Boyd: A Case Study (Peter Lang, 2006). His research now centres on postcolonial science fiction and alternate history. He has recently been awarded the Premio de Jovenes Investigadores in the field of the Humanities by his University.