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. 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. 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 and Susanna Meredith, Corporaal charts the reconfigurations of memory in fiction across generations and national borders.
"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 recentyears."
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 unders
David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English, U.C. Riverside
