Memory Ireland

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.