The impact of the Irish famine of 1845-1852 was unparalleled in both political and psychological terms.
The effects of famine-related mortality and emigration were devastating, in the field of literature no less than in other areas.
In this incisive new study, Melissa Fegan explores the famine's legacy to literature, tracing it in the work of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919.
Dr Fegan examines both fiction and non-fiction, including journalism, travel-narratives and the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope.
She argues that an examination of famine literature that simply categorizes it as 'minor' or views it only as a silence or an absence misses the very real contribution that it makes to our understanding of the period. This is an important contribution to the study of Irish history and literature, sharply illuminating contemporary Irish mentalities.
By:
Melissa Fegan ( Lecturer in English University of Chester)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 224mm,
Width: 145mm,
Spine: 21mm
Weight: 457g
ISBN: 9780199254644
ISBN 10: 0199254648
Series: Oxford Historical Monographs
Pages: 292
Publication Date: 01 September 2002
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: Not So Ambiguous 1: Faction: The Historiography of the Great Famine 2: War of Words: The Famine in The Times and the Nation 3: Victims and Voyeurs: Travelling in Famine Ireland 4: The Immigrant's Evasion: The Subtext of Trollope's 'Famine' Novels 5: William Carleton in Retrospect: The Irish Prophecy Man 6: 'A Ghastly Spectral Army': History, Identity, and the Visionary Poet 7: The Black Stream: Politics and Proselytism in Second-Generation Famine Novels Conclusion Bibliography Index
Melissa Fegan is a Lecturer in English at Chester College of Higher Education.
Reviews for Literature and the Irish Famine 1845-1919
... recommend[ed] as a fine advertisement for Irish Studies at its best. Irish Studies Review ... there is much to interest historians of the Famine. Irish Studies Review ... refreshing insights captured by a careful regard for period and chronology, allied to informed literary criticism, written with clarity and authority. Irish Studies Review [Melissa Fegan's] work is a valuable and sophisticated negotiation between the disciplines of history and literature. Times Literary Supplement ... luminous ... It is a study which greatly enriches and complicates the excellent literary analyses of the Famine already provided by Margaret Kelleher and Christopher Morash over the past decade ... fine book. Times Literary Supplement ... a satisfyingly comprehensive treatment, which puts the picturesque tradition into a coolly dialectical relationship with the far messier world of social process. Times Literary Supplement
