Internationalization or Globalization? Myth, Technology, and Mobility in Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl Series

Abstract

While Melling and Thompson caution against a causal jettisoning of the past in an uncritical embrace of modernity, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, which is the focus of Chap. 5, revels in the time-space compression of global modernity. This chapter examines Colfer’s novel reinvention of Irish myth and the trope of the Big House to create a futuristic world of high speed, technology, and financial skulduggery that captures the zeitgeist of the Celtic Tiger era and the drama of its sudden demise. The chapter identifies ways in which the series was a new departure in Irish children’s literature, not least in its celebration of a child anti-hero free from ties of family and nation, with the world at his fingertips. However, the subversiveness of the series is called into question and the extent to which it perpetuates the capitalist ideology of the Celtic Tiger era in which it was born is considered. The chapter examines Colfer’s imagining of home in a risk society that necessitates fortification and surveillance and questions whether the construction of child readers as consumers neutralizes the potential for critique that parody, the analogy of the Big House, and the child anti-hero might otherwise allow.