Memory Ireland - (Irish Studies) 2nd Edition by Oona Frawley (Hardcover)

About the Book

Irelands status as an island nation with a history of emigration has meant the development of a body of diasporic cultural memory. This book opens new pathways into the body of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating time and again the ways in which memory is supported by the negotiations of individuals within wider cultural contexts.

Book Synopsis

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?

In its second half, this volume shifts its attention to the concept of "memory practices," ways of cultural remembering that result from and are shaped by particular cultural forms. Many of these cultural forms embody memory materially through language, music, and photography and, because of their distinctive expressions of culture, give rise to distinctive memory practices. Gathering the leading voices in Irish studies, this volume opens new pathways into the body of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating time and again the ways in which memory is supported by the negotiations of individuals within wider cultural contexts.

Contributors include: Aidan Arrowsmith, Hasia Diner, Joep Leerssen, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Review Quotes

Recommended for the contribution it makes to memory studies and Irish studies, for the quality of the individual essays, and for the interest that readers and scholars of Joyce might take in the subject.-- "James Joyce Quarterly"

About the Author

Oona Frawley is a lecturer in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is the author of Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature and the editor of contributed volumes on James Joyce and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.