“I come back to stand here, a revenant”: Brian Moore’s “Returned Yank” Travel Writing

Abstract

In line with the special issue’s commitment to elucidating some of Brian Moore’s less well-known works, this article focuses on a significant set of his nonfiction essays that are explicitly framed as “travel writing,” particularly those that appeared in the U.S. magazines Holiday and Travel & Leisure. It takes seriously Michael Cronin’s assertion that the literature of migration and diaspora has overshadowed Irish travel writing in scholarly commentaries, with the potential danger that “only certain forms of movement are privileged in analysis”: “The permanent move to Canada but not the sojourn in Sicily, the emigrants’ letters home from Australia but not the visit to Berlin, become objects of critical inquiry.” Considering Moore’s travel writing about Ireland in particular, the article argues that Moore adopts a highly self-conscious “Returned Yank” persona to negotiate some of the tensions of travel writing itself. Focusing on three prominent spaces in Moore’s Irish travel writing – Belfast, the West of Ireland and the Anglo-Irish “Big House” – the article explores the ways in which Moore fashions a “travel writing” self that is just as fictitious as any of the characters in his novels, enabling him to simultaneously meet the expectations of his U.S. editors and readers and satisfy his own urge to inform, educate and subtly critique some of the clichés of travel writing about Ireland.