This paper focuses on Benedict Kiely’s relationship with The New Yorker, in which he published seventeen stories between 1958 and 1976. Supplementing recent scholarship about Irish writers and The New Yorker – such as full-length studies of Brian Friel’s and Mary Lavin’s relationships with the magazine – the paper argues that Kiely’s stories make a fascinating case study because they are intensely self-reflexive about the act of storytelling, about the process by which a given narrative is constructed and about the mode of that narrative’s transmission. By embedding in the stories themselves reflections on the collaborative nature of storytelling, magazine culture and how cultural material is transformed through transatlantic exchange (invariably an economic transaction), Kiely’s New Yorker stories can be seen to be engaged in a critical dialogue with the institutional and editorial structures of The New Yorker itself.

Sinéad Moynihan is Professor in American and Atlantic Literatures in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The "Returned Yank" in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to present (Liverpool UP, 2019), which was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies. She also published "Other People's Diasporas": Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture (Syracuse UP, 2013). Her current research project is titled For Export Only: Irish Writers and U.S. Magazines, 1940 to 1970.

This seminar will be available in hybrid form, in-person and online via Teams.