New Irish studies books: Memory Ireland

 

Memory Ireland: Volume 3: The Famine and the Troubles

Edited by Oona Frawley

Cloth $44.95s    |    978-0-8156-3351-8    |    2014

Cultural memory has in recent years been taken up with enthusiasm across the domain of area studies and the humanities generally. Ireland, with its trauma-filled history and huge global diaspora, presents an ideal subject for work in this vein. This series as a whole seeks to construct a landscape of cultural memory in Ireland, focusing in particular on how cognitive capacity for memory might influence the formation of cultural memory and how that cultural memory shifts over time.

Volume 3 focuses on the impact of the Famine and the Troubles on the formation and study of Irish cultural memory. Topics considered include hunger strikes, monuments to the Famine, trauma and the politics of memory in the Irish peace process, and Ulster Loyalist battles in the twenty-first century. Gathering the work of leading scholars such as Margaret Kelleher, Joseph Lennon, David Lloyd, Joseph Valente, and Gerald Dawe, this collection is an essential contribution to the field of Irish studies.

 

Memory Ireland: Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory

Edited by Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan

Cloth $44.95s    |    978-0-8156-3352-5    |    2014

In the fourth and final volume of the Memory Ireland series, Frawley and O’Callaghan explore the manifestations and values of cultural memory in Joyce’s Ireland, both real and imagined. An exemplary author to consider in relation to questions of how it is that history is remembered and recycled, Joyce creates characters that confront particularly the fraught relationship between the individual and the historical past; the crisis of colonial history in relation to the colonized state; and the relationship between the individual’s memory of his or her own past and the past of the broader culture.

The collection includes leading Joyce scholars including Luke Gibbons, Vincent Cheng, and Declan Kiberd and considers such topics as Jewish memory in Ulysses, history and memory in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce and the Bible.