‘Seanachie to the New World’: Seumas MacManus and the Transatlantic Appeal of Irish Local Colour

Abstract

From the late 1890s onwards, Donegal writer Seumas MacManus was a frequent contributor to leading American periodicals and was often listed alongside noted American local colour writers. Moreover, the first books he published in America were immediately successful. MacManus rooted his work explicitly in Donegal and its seanchaí tradition, and in the United States in particular his works were positioned as representative of an authentic Celticity. But why did MacManus’s work translate so readily to the American market? And what were the contexts that engendered the success of his stories and books? Using reviews, profiles, promotional materials, letters, and MacManus’s self-presentations, this article explores how his work contributed to the construction and commodification of a transatlantic sense of Irishness rooted in local colour conventions. It concludes that the American reception of his work demonstrates how apparently local formations of regional identity garnered transatlantic attention not only as a function of their exoticness, but also as a result of the instrumentalisation of domestic literary conventions that generated conceptual links between localness and universality.