New Publication: The Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846-1870

Syracuse University Press

Relocated Memories

THE GREAT FAMINE IN IRISH AND DIASPORA FICTION, 1846–1870

Marguérite Corporaal

Hardcover $65.00; 978-0-8156-3498-0

Ebook 978-0-8156-5398-1

Paper $34.95; 978-0-8156-3513-0

6 x 9, 320 pages, 8 b/w illustrations, notes, bibliography, index Series: Irish Studies

APRIL 2017

An exploration of the Famine in Irish fiction across time and in diaspora.

“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.

 

“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.

 

“Corporaal’s focus on the surprisingly extensive literature produced in the two decades after the Famine shatters many settled assumptions about Irish cultural amnesia, while her study of the transformations of memory across space and time establish crucial new approaches to cultural transmissions and interactions. This is one of those rare books that profoundly change their fields and our understanding of our history.”

—David Lloyd, Department of English, University of California, Riverside

 

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. The Famine also left its undeniable imprint on Ireland’s cultural legacies, both at home and in the diaspora. 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. She uncovers a vast corpus of fiction that consciously addresses the harrowing memories of recent starvation. These novels, novellas, and stories were often published in Ireland, but a large body of this fiction was also written by Irish American and Irish Canadian immigrants and their descendants. 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, Susanna Meredith, Anna Dorsey, and Henry J. Monahan, Corporaal charts the reconfigurations of memory in fiction across generations and national borders. In doing so, she succeeds in bringing significant literary expressions of the tragedy back to the attention of scholars and provides a wider vista of literary Famine memories. 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.

For more information, contact: Lisa Kuerbis, Marketing 315-443-5546;lkuerbis@syr.edu