Abstract
This essay explores Irish social memories of fasting and hunger by reading works by James Clarence Mangan, Speranza (Lady Wilde), W.B. Yeats, and three folk stories recorded in the Schools Collection of the National Folklore Archive. In Famine lyric poetry about hunger and dreams, listeners appear indicted by hungry voices that become increasingly close to the reader. Folk stories both remember the Famine and recall the dynamics of hospitality and fasting in medieval Irish texts, where the Middle Irish word troscud suggests fasting against something or someone, unlike spiritual fasting, óine, which implies an emptying. Focussing on dreams of the hungry, these works indicate how hospitality and fasting entwine in Ireland's social memory of hunger.
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