Search Results

Demonstrates the ways in which two thematically and structurally similar novels, Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You (2001) and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), complicate popular uses of the Famine narrative in arguments on both sides of the debate over Irish independence. By calling forth ghosts from the Nineteenth Century to expose both intentional and unintentional misrepresentations of the Famine (imagery, ideological meaning, and political mandate), O’Faolain and O’Connor redefine modern Ireland in terms of hunger and dispossession, revealing a more complex national narrative and a more cosmopolitan national identity.

Those who suffered the Great Irish Famine most were the poor and the destitute, and they represented the vast majority of Ireland’s one million Famine dead during this period. Those who died in the Kilkenny Union workhouse between 1847 and 1851 belonged to this social class, but as the historical records are generally selective towards the middle and upper classes in Victorian period Ireland, relatively little is known about them. The bioarchaeological study of their skeletal remains has revealed aspects of their lives and deaths which were previously unknown, such as the health impact of the diseases they endured, the injuries they acquired, and the smoking of clay-pipes they enjoyed. The study has also given an insight into who was granted access to the workhouse during the Famine crisis, and how for some a physical disability added to the suffering of the Famine. The value of archaeology to the study of the Great Famine has not always been given the recognition it deserves, but this study has contributed to the discourse seeking widened and cross-disciplinary perspectives onto research of this period.

Long constrained by the political and cultural tensions informing Anglo-Irish relations, the historiography of the Great Irish Famine has traditionally received only limited interest from academic scholars. This has changed in recent years, however, and there is now increasing acknowledgment of the value of archaeological research into the period. Bioarchaeology holds great promise as a means to explore the “human experience” of the famine on both individual and population levels. There is also considerable value in addressing the famine from a local perspective, using microarchaeology and microhistory as research models. Such approaches make accessible the complexity and variability of the famine, avoiding the formation of simplistic conclusions about what the period meant to the people who suffered most.

Emphasizes a spectral blending of Famine and World War II imagery in Sebastian Barry’s novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), which argues against Irish neutrality. I define and measure the effect of spectrality in Barry’s fiction by focusing on the ghostly (tropes, modes, themes, and forms that bring multiple histories and fictions into dialogue with one another) to trace the way in which Barry crafts a Famine subtext that functions as a critique of Ireland’s non-engagement. Eneas Mcnulty employs imagery that conjures the history of the Famine into the historical space of World War II, and can therefore be read as invoking that nineteenth-century Irish trauma as rationale not for neutrality, but engagement.

This chapter focuses on the Fenian movement on both sides of the Atlantic. It begins with a discussion of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s and with the influential writings of the Young Ireland exile, John Mitchel, who interpreted the Famine as an act of British genocide against the Irish people. It discusses the formation of the Fenian Brotherhood (called the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland) in exile circles in New York in 1850s and then examines the organization’s growth and activities in both the United States and Ireland in the 1860s, including Fenian service in the Union army in the American Civil War, an unsuccessful Irish rebellion in 1867, and armed Fenian raids on Canada in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It concludes with an analysis of the Clan na Gael, a successor to the Fenians, in the 1870s.

A case study that underscores the dual political and artistic identity of Postcolonial Irish authors in action in order to delineate where Irish studies scholars stand with spectrality as a critical lens for analyzing the present and coming fiction about twenty-first-century Ireland. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949, trans. 1953) fluently theorizes this dual aesthetic and political identity, thereby bridging the high modernism of James Joyce and the postcolonial spectrality of Haunted Historiographies’ Post-Celtic Tiger authors.

The unique opportunity to explore the experience of the Great Irish Famine through a bioarchaeological analysis of the skeletal remains of its victims has provided insights not only into the how this period was experienced by people, but also the experience of poverty in mid-nineteenth century Ireland. The skeletal population from the Kilkenny Union Workhouse mass burials revealed insights into past lives full of hardship and suffering of disease, which culminated in death during the height of one of the worst subsistence crises in human history. The reburial of these remains in 2010 provided a last and final respectful treatment in death to these people, who originally were buried in haste in unconsecrated mass burial pits.