"A work that brings the best of contemporary theoretical work to bear on nearly seventy fictions of the Irish Famine and leads to lucid and subtle conclusions about a complex subject."—Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies
"Relocated Memories constitutes a considerable advancement on Charles Fanning’s groundbreaking work on Irish American Famine fiction. . . Corporaal has been at the forefront of Irish Famine studies in recent years, so this book’s publication has been eagerly awaited. Relocated Memories proves itself to be well worth the wait."—Irish Studies Reivew
"An invaluable resource for scholars in critically examining the nature and function of history, memory, and commemoration."—Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
"This is one of the most important contributions to Famine studies in recent years."—Melissa Fegan, author of Literature and the Irish Famine, 1845–1919
"After reading Relocated Memories, it is no longer possible to think about the Irish Famine purely in an Irish context. With this book, Marguérite Corporaal has expanded the map of the field."—Chris Morash, Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing, Trinity College Dublin
Description
The Great Famine radically transformed Ireland; nearly one million people of the rural countryside died, and the eviction of farmers led to massive emigration. The Famine encouraged anti-English, nationalist sentiments, and this trauma is seen as pivotal in the development of an Irish anticolonial consciousness and in the identity formation of transatlantic Irish communities. In Relocated Memories, Corporaal challenges the persistent assumption that the first decades after the Great Irish Famine were marked by a pervasive silence on the catastrophe. Discussing works by well-known authors such as William Carleton and Anthony Trollope as well as more obscure texts by, among others, Dillon O’Brien and Susanna Meredith, Corporaal charts the reconfigurations of memory in fiction across generations and national borders.
About the Author
Marguérite Corporaal is associate professor of English at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She is the coeditor of Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century.
April 2017