Literature And The Irish Famine 1845-1919

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 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 contribution that it makes to our understanding of the period.

Review: ... 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 * ... 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 * [Melissa Fegan's] work is a valuable and sophisticated negotiation between the disciplines of history and literature. * Times Literary Supplement * ... refreshing insights captured by a careful regard for period and chronology, allied to informed literary criticism, written with clarity and authority. * Irish Studies Review * ... there is much to interest historians of the Famine. * Irish Studies Review * ... recommend[ed] as a fine advertisement for Irish Studies at its best. * Irish Studies Review *