The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which John McGahern constructs the world of nostalgia for the Irish Protestant tradition in his Anglo-Irish stories. His nostalgic longing arises from the tension between realism and modernism in postliberation Ireland. First, McGahern, a Catholic writer, laments the loss of both the intellectual and aesthetic traditions of the Anglo-Irish in the course of national emancipation and modernization. He critically describes the postliberation space where exclusive Catholic-State ideology suppresses intelligent and aesthetic cultures in the name of faith and practicality. Second, McGahern’s nostalgia for the Protestant tradition is enabled by his awareness of history as a downfall, not teleological progress. In using allegories of the ruins of Protestant Big Houses, he reveals the absurdity of the established order, through which his style is distinguishable from the mode of realism. Last, McGahern completes the world of nostalgia with his downward epiphany and aesthetic tension with reality. It is McGahern’s aesthetic sensitivity that keeps his works from falling into naturalism, despite his epiphany directed toward the downfall of history.