Great Hunger Research Articles

Exploring Contrasts: Depiction of Irish Rural Life in Yeats and Kavanagh

This paper aims to investigate the depiction of Irish rural life in selected poems by W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. Modern Irish poetry presents two contrasting perspectives on the portrayal of rural Ireland. Some poets like W. B. Yeats, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney, along with other leading Irish poets, romanticize the Irish countryside, portraying it as charming, magnificent, and idyllic. These poets prefer to live in tune with nature, tempted by its pastoral landscape and inspired by its idealized tranquility. In contrast, other modern Irish poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, Michael Hartnett, and many others, reject this idealized vision of the countryside. Instead, they offer a stark portrayal of rural Ireland, exposing its harsh realities and revealing the poverty, struggles, and hardships encountered by Irish peasants. This article, accordingly, seeks to explore these two different literary traditions within modern Irish poetry, with a focus on W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh as representatives of opposing attitudes. Specifically, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats and The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh serve as the concentration for this study. In reaching its conclusions, the article finally reveals the divergent perspectives portrayed within the two poems, highlighting how Yeats and Kavanagh employ distinct poetic techniques to present their attitudes, sharply contrasting each other.

With great power comes great hunger: Marvel Zombies as parody of the superhero trope

ABSTRACT There has always been something of the monster baked into the comic book superhero’s DNA. Whether it pertains to the reality-bending powers of superhero soaring through the air, seeing through walls, setting her body aflame or altering her size, or by the more Gothic literary antecedents and ‘science gone amok’ themes constitutive of their origin stories, the comic book superhero treads a fine line between saviour and monster, as often evinced in the oscillating reactions of approbation and fear displayed by the diegetic public’s reaction to them. Marvel Zombies, Marvel Comics’ commercially successful depiction of its beloved superheroes as ravenous, flesh-eating cannibals, expresses one of the more recent and unsettling throwbacks to the monstrous origins and nature of the Marvel superhero. Employing Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s methodology of reading culture from the figure of the monster, this article proposes to explore Marvel Zombies as an indictment and parodic criticism of the Marvel Superhero. Just as the double is, per Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach, an uncanny reminder of repressed truths and desires, so too does the decaying Marvel Zombie function as the uncanny doppelganger of the Marvel superhero, revealing the stagnant character development at its rotten core.

"Might Be Better Designated Slaughterhouses": Conditions in the Auxiliary Workhouses during the Great Hunger

"Might Be Better Designated Slaughterhouses": Conditions in the Auxiliary Workhouses during the Great Hunger

Féar Gortach

Folklore, as an ever-changing set of stories and traditions, provides valuable insight into the emotional and cultural impact of historical events. In Ireland, one can find an excellent case study in the evolving stories of the Féar Gortach. Also known as Hungry Grass, this particular Irish legend centers around patches of earth that instill intense feelings of hunger in those who cross it. Traditionally characterized as the doing of fairies, the legend began to see a cultural shift in the latter half of the nineteenth century following the tragedy of the Great Hunger. Beginning in 1845, the Great Hunger, otherwise known as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of mass starvation and emigration in Ireland, brought about by the repeated failure of the potato crop due to agricultural disease. In the wake of this national tragedy, the legend of the Féar Gortach began to change. This paper examines how stories of the Féar Gortach were used to memorialize and process the Great Hunger in Ireland, drawing upon the imagery of funerary rites and nineteenth century famine walls in order to produce a uniquely Irish means of grappling with the tragedy.

‘An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger): Passage to India’ – Exploring genealogy and roots tourism through documentary filmmaking

This article presents a documentary film produced and enacted by one of the authors as a way of knowing, constructing and representing a specific form of tourist consumption, namely genealogy tourism. The documentary ( https://vimeo.com/825001015?share=copy ), entitled ‘An Gorta Mor’ (Gaelic words that translate to ‘The Great Hunger’, the Irish famine that occurred from 1845 to 1852), functions as both a vehicle to produce and present the ethnographic fieldwork conducted by one of the authors to trace back his ancestral roots and the empirical material to be analysed. The documentary unveils two emergent themes. The first is that genealogy tourism involves multiple fluid places and transnational identities that question ‘fixed’ notions of ‘motherland’, ‘home’ and ‘family’. The second refers to roots tourism as a vehicle to propel bonding and bridging social capital. Methodologically, as a form of arts-based research, this work promotes embodied alternative ways of knowing tourist realities and selves.

Lord Dufferin, Ireland and the British Empire, c. 1820–1900: Rule by the Best? by Annie Tindley, and: Heroes of Ireland's Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran (review)

Lord Dufferin, Ireland and the British Empire, c. 1820–1900: Rule by the Best? by Annie Tindley, and: Heroes of Ireland's Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran (review)

Levounis to Emphasize Public Engagement in Presidential Year Focused on Addiction Treatment

Levounis to Emphasize Public Engagement in Presidential Year Focused on Addiction Treatment

‘Whatever I Say Goes’: Cultural Relations and Patrick Kavanagh's Global Parochialism

This essay refigures conventional partitions of local and global spaces by uncovering the fate of rural labour, as it became the showpiece of an Irish state attempting to attract American material support after the Second World War. As Ireland advertised its rural land in an aggressive drive to attract American tourists – referring to itself as ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’ – Patrick Kavanagh found his local expertise and the focus of The Great Hunger becoming everyone’s business. This essay argues that it is by considering Kavanagh’s competition with agencies of cultural export, especially in the pages of his self-published newspaper Kavanagh’s Weekly and his lyrics of the 1950s, that we can comprehend his late redefinition of the long poem as a genre paradoxically too small to match the even longer reach of what he called ‘this superstructure of finance, this fairyland.’

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran (review)

Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran (review)

Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran (review)

Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran (review)

Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland, edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran

Reviewed by: Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland ed. by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran Amy E. Martin (bio) Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland, edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran; pp. xxxiii + 293. Hamden, CT and Cork: Quinnipiac University Press, 2018, $29.00. Since the 1990s, there has been a veritable explosion of scholarly studies of the Great Famine in Ireland (An Gorta Mór in the Irish language) approaching the catastrophe and ensuing trauma from a variety of disciplinary frameworks. What began as a largely historiographical project—to recuperate and to document the human losses due to food scarcity and starvation between 1845 and 1852 and to develop arguments about its causes—has expanded to many fields and to the consideration and analysis of numerous archives. However, as Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran, the editors of Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland, rightly contend, children's experiences of the Irish Famine, their subsequent emigration, and their central place in contemporaneous and later literary and cultural representations of the Great Famine have received scant attention in the scholarly works of the last three decades. That absence is striking on its own. It is all the more so when we bear in mind developments in childhood studies in Ireland and recent urgent attention to infants and children propelled by inquiries into the Magdalene Laundries, Irish child homes, and other church-run institutions in which abuse and high infant and child mortality occurred. These contexts make this volume an especially important contribution to our understanding of the Great Famine itself and the ways in which this cataclysm dramatically changed the cultural, social, linguistic, religious, and demographic landscape of Ireland and the Irish diaspora to the present. This volume is multidisciplinary in unexpected and exciting ways, but it opens with a series of primarily historical essays that establish the experiences and fate of children during the Famine, in particular the many who ended up in workhouses established by [End Page 572] the Irish Poor Law of 1838. While there is some unnecessary overlap in these contributions, they do an excellent job of setting the stage for the remainder of the collection. In particular, the juxtaposition of Kinealy's reading of firsthand accounts of the suffering of children with the more quantitative and bureaucratic-focused work of Moran and Simon Gallaher provides a rich and multifaceted foundation for what follows. In a fine essay on children abandoned in workhouses for the two decades after the Famine, Gallaher posits workhouses as sites of biopolitical experimentation concerning the management and containment of parentless children. Another crucial intervention of this essay, and of several others in this collection, is the extension of a timeline of famine inquiry, arguing that the immediate impact, trauma, and multiple "scars" of the Famine continued into the 1850s and 60s and well beyond (52). This first section is rounded out by Jonny Geber's fascinating essay on how bioarcheology—the study of bones found at mass graves—can illuminate childhood physiological experiences of the Famine in ways that other methodologies cannot. Taken together, these opening contributions reveal the contours and the extremity of the physical and psychological suffering of children during the Famine in Ireland. The remaining essays in the volume are organized into two sections. The first focuses on children who immigrated to Canada as a result of the Famine. The specificity of this section is quite different from the other two in its concentration on one very particular instance in the history of famine emigration. At the same time, the cluster of essays functions as a kind of case study that elucidates the experiences of children who traveled across the Atlantic in coffin ships. Together and individually, these contributions provide a rich historiographical picture of the often harrowing lives of the Irish Famine orphans who were resettled in Eastern Canada as well as a vivid account of the institutions that managed them and determined their fates. These essays also provide larger insights beyond the specific context of Irish children who ended up in Quebec and New Brunswick. For example, Mark McGowan offers a transformative analysis of the ways that...

Dante’s Influence on Seamus Heaney’s Poetry on the Troubles in Northern Ireland: “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “An Afterwards” and “Ugolino”

Dante’s Divine Comedy had an enormous influence on Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre, especially from Field Work (1979) onwards. Heaney exploits the great Dantean epic poem to create a framework that allows him to contextualise some of the most painful political and social episodes in Irish history, namely the Great Hunger and the secular clashes between Protestants and Catholics. Heaney pays special attention to the problems originating from the outburst of the atavistic and sectarian violence—euphemistically known as “the Troubles”—between the unionist and nationalist communities in Northern Ireland as from 1969, causing great suffering and wreaking havoc on the Northern Irish population for decades.

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“The priests do their best to inflame the people.” Religious actors in Ireland, 1800–1845: Instigators of violence or peacemakers?

After the 1801 Act of Union uniting Ireland and Great Britain, and the broken promises made to Catholics, Daniel O’Connell founded the Catholic Association which combined religious and political demands. Despite the pacifying dimension of the movement, the decades preceding the Great Hunger (1845–1851) saw several episodes of violence, before reaching a climax during the revolutionary movement of 1848. Relying on Philippe Braud’s definition of political violence and the study of British and Catholic authorities’ correspondence among other sources, this article intends to shed light on the different dynamics at work in the rise in violence. It also examines the various attempts to readjust to and withdraw from acts of violence, to move beyond ambiguities and better assess the role played by religious agents.

What Shall I Wear, Darling, to The Great Hunger?

What Shall I Wear, Darling, to The Great Hunger?

Kenmare: History and Survival. Fr John O'Sullivan and the Famine Poor by Colum Kenny

Reviewed by: Kenmare: History and Survival. Fr John O'Sullivan and the Famine Poor by Colum Kenny Christine Kinealy Kenmare: History and Survival. Fr John O'Sullivan and the Famine Poor, by Colum Kenny (Dublin: Eastwood Books, 2021, 336 p., paperback, €20) As the 175th anniversary of Black '47 approaches, there appears to be no diminishing of interest in learning about the Great Hunger. Moreover, the story is being told through an impressive variety of mediums. In 2021 alone, these include a much-acclaimed two-part documentary by RTÉ, The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine; an online digital timeline of the Famine, incorporating maps from Cork University's best-selling Atlas of the Great Irish Famine; an Irish-language film, Arracht, which is set in the west of the country and is Ireland's foreign film Oscar entry; the National Famine Way (a trail from Roscommon to Dublin based on the route taken by 1,490 Strokestown emigrants in 1847) being named one of the best walks in the world; and a first novel from award-winning singer/songwriter Declan O'Rourke, The Pawnbroker's Reward, set in 1846. New publications by historians include Heroes of Ireland's Great Hunger, demonstrating that there are still aspects of this tragedy that remain to be explored. Some of the most significant contributions to our ever-expanding knowledge of the Famine, however, have been made by local historians, whose understanding of a particular area allows for an in-depth and informed interrogation of local sources that are often omitted from national studies. Additionally, they frequently serve to give a voice to those who are often voiceless, and who are invisible or reduced to a statistic in larger narratives. Local studies also reinforce the fact that, while the Famine was a national tragedy and no region or denomination escaped its ravages, each area experienced the calamity in a way that was unique. Overall, therefore, a more nuanced, complex, and intimate view of the Famine emerges as a result of these rich, local histories. Two powerful local studies that were released in 2021 are Brendan Hoban's Ocras: The Great Famine in Killala Diocese and Kenmare: History and [End Page 153] Survival. Fr John O'Sullivan and the Famine Poor by Colum Kenny. Both are highly recommended. Kenny's examination of the Famine in Kenmare also provides a history of this small town in County Kerry from its origins to the present day. The focus, however, is very clearly on the famine years. A major but previously little-used source for this study was the handwritten journal of local Catholic priest Father John O'Sullivan, who, since 1839, had been responsible for Kenmare and Templenoe parish. While in some ways O'Sullivan emerges as a local hero and champion of the poor, his portrayal comes with a warning from Kenny that the priest was "no plaster cast saint." Instead, his contradictions and quirks are laid bare, but in a way that makes both the priest and the tragedy feel relatable. O'Sullivan was himself part of the emerging Catholic middle class, a number of whom benefited from the Famine. As the salaried chaplain of the local workhouse, he had firsthand knowledge of the sufferings in the district and of the disease, death, and desperation caused by successive failures of the potato crop. Faced with the inadequacy of government relief provision, he proved to be a fearless champion of the rights of the local poor, challenging the bureaucracy that acted as a barrier to a quick and efficient distribution of relief, and even lobbying the administrators in Dublin and London who held the power and the purse strings. Juxtaposed against the ever-present Father O'Sullivan was the Third Marquess of Lansdowne, owner of almost a hundred thousand acres of land in the county, including Kenmare. It was estimated that during his long life (1780–1863) Lansdowne visited his Kerry estate only five times, the final occasion being in 1840, meaning he did not witness any of the famine suffering firsthand. In this sense, he falls into the category of an absentee landlord—the group so fiercely criticized by Quakers and others for their...

Life Under Fetters: Trevor’s “The Potato Dealer” and Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”

Life Under Fetters: Trevor’s “The Potato Dealer” and Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”

Book review: Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland

Book review: Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland

Rola języka w uwalnianiu się z dziedzicznych traum

The Role of Language in Releasing from Inherited Traumas. Negotiations of the Social Position of the Silesian Minority in Serbian Banat&#x0D; The aim of the paper is to show the dependence between language, collective memory (also post-memory) and sense of identity. This issue is analysed using the example of an ethnic minority living in the village of Ostojićevo (Banat, Serbia) called ‘Toutowie.’ Their ancestors came in the 19th century from Wisła (Silesian Cieszyn, Poland); they left their homes because of great hunger and were looking for jobs in Banat. Narratives about the past contain traumatic experiences of the past generations transmitted in the Silesian dialect and constituting communicative memory. At the same time, a new Polish national identity is being constructed, supported by institutions and authorities; it carries a new image of the world and creates a new cultural memory. This new identity – shaped on the basis of national categories – leads to changes of its self-identification and gives the opportunity to raise its social position in the multi-ethnic Banat community.