Memory Ireland

Despite the ease with which scholars have used the term "memory" in recent decades, its definition remains enigmatic. Does cultural memory rely on the memories of individuals, or does it take shape beyond the borders of the individual mind? Cultural memory has garnered particular attention within Irish studies. With its trauma-filled history and sizable global diaspora, Ireland presents an ideal subject for work in this vein. What do stereotypes of Irish memory-as extensive, unforgiving, begrudging, but also blank on particular, usually traumatic, subjects-reveal about the ways in which cultural remembrance works in contemporary Irish culture and in Irish diasporic culture? How do icons of Irishness-from the harp to the cottage, from the Celtic cross to a figure like James Joyce-function in cultural memory? This collection seeks to address these questions as it maps a landscape of cultural memory in Ireland through theoretical, historical, literary, and cultural explorations by top scholars in the field of Irish studies. In a series that will ultimately include four volumes, the sixteen essays in this first volume explore remembrance and forgetting throughout history, from early modern Ireland to contemporary multicultural Ireland. Among the many subjects addressed: Guy Beiner disentangles "collective" from "folk" memory in "Remembering and Forgetting the Irish Rebellion of 1798," and Anne Dolan looks at local memory of the civil war in "Embodying the Memory of War and Civil War." The volume concludes with Alan Titley's "The Great Forgetting," a compelling argument for viewing modern Irish culture as an artifact of the Europeanization of Ireland and for bringing into focus the urgent need for further, wide-ranging Irishlanguage scholarship.

In the second volume of a series that will ultimately include four, the authors consider Irish diasporic memory and memory practices. While the Irish diaspora has become the subject of a wide range of scholar­ship, there has been little work focused on its relationship to memory. The first half of the volume asks how diasporic memory functions in dif­ferent places and times, and what forms it takes on. As an island nation with a history of emigration, Ireland has developed a rich diasporic cultural memory, one that draws on multiple traditions and his­toriographies of both "home" and "away." Native traditions are not imported wholesale, but instead develop their own curious hybridity, reflecting the nature of emigrant memory that absorbs new ways of thinking about home. How do immigrants remember their homeland? How do descendants of immigrants "remem­ber" a land they rarely visit? How does diasporic memory pass through families, and how is it represented in cultural forms such as literature, festivals, and souvenirs?

Volume 3 focuses on the impact of the Famine and the Troubles on the formation and study of Irish cultural memory. Topics considered include hunger strikes, monuments to the Famine, trauma and the politics of memory in the Irish peace process, and Ulster Loyalist battles in the twenty-first century. Gathering the work of leading scholars such as Margaret Kelleher, Joseph Lennon, David Lloyd, Joseph Valente, and Gerald Dawe, this collection is an essential contribution to the field of Irish studies.

In the fourth and final volume of the Memory Ireland series, Frawley and O'Callaghan explore the manifestations and values of cultural memory in Joyce's Ireland, both real and imagined. An exemplary author to consider in relation to questions of how it is that history is remembered and recycled, Joyce creates characters that confront particularly the fraught relationship between the individual and the historical past; the crisis of colonial history in relation to the colonized state; and the relationship between the individual's memory of his or her own past and the past of the broader culture. The collection includes leading Joyce scholars including Luke Gibbons, Vincent Cheng, and Declan Kiberd and considers such topics as Jewish memory in Ulysses, history and memory in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce and the Bible.