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The Great Hunger (1845-49) radically transformed Ireland: it led to the wide-scale eviction of farmers, killed one million of the rural population, and caused massive emigration to other parts of the British Empire and the United States. Moreover, the Great Famine encouraged anti-English, nationalist sentiments and its trauma is pivotal to the development of an Irish postcolonial consciousness between 1847-1921. There is a vast unexplored transatlantic corpus of prose fiction, written between the aftermath of the Famine and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which remembers the years of starvation and diaspora.
My project is the first to inventorise and bring together this under-researched body of literature, written in Ireland and by Irish immigrants in England, Canada and the United States. This fiction requires intensive examination for significant reasons, offering alternative perspectives on how the Famine was culturally experienced than previous studies have displayed, and representing subaltern voices and recollections. Moreover, the texts are written in the homeland as well as in diaspora, by migrated Irish or their descendants. An examination of the corpus will therefore move beyond the largely nation-oriented frontiers of cultural memory studies towards innovative, transnational approaches.
The project specifically investigates how remembrance is mediated through time, from one generation to another, and space, in diaspora. It aims to evolve a novel theoretical model about the interaction between temporal and spatial relocation in literary remembrance. This pioneering model will generate groundbreaking insights into the interaction between memory and ethnic identity in comparative contexts of cultural dislocation, a colonised homeland and migrant communities; and in processes of cultural relocation: de-colonisation and ethnic integration. At the same time, the project will analyse genre aspects which play a dynamic role in processes of cultural remembrance, contributing a new perspective to the interdisciplinary debate on media of recollection in cultural memory studies.
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