Potato Famine
Ireland 1845-1851
Synopsis
The Irish potato famine killed one million people and led 2.5 million people to emigrate, making it one of the worst famines in modern European history. The Ir...
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In the following excerpt, Kelleher surveys Famine novels and poetry, maintaining that one of the primary issues concerning nineteenth-century Famine literature is the fulfillment of "its role i...
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In the following essay, Kelleher re-examines the eyewitness account of the Famine by Asenath Nicholson, an American teacher who traveled to Ireland during the Famine in order to "personally inv...
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In the essay that follows, Morash explores the manner by which Famine literature constructed collective memories of the Famine, maintaining that literature contemporary with the Famine contains ...
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The following essay is taken from Sullivan's New Ireland, which was published just thirty years after the Famine of 1847. In the essay Sullivan attempts not a "formal history" of ...
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A. Nicholson Describes a Starving Man:
[R]eader, if you have never seen a starving human being, may you never! In my childhood I had been frightened with the stories of ghosts, and had seen actual s...
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In the following essay, Hennedy examines the relationship in Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond (1860) between the love story and the Famine backdrop. The critic argues, contrary to earlier sch...
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In this excerpt from Hastings' introduction to Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond (1860), the critic argues that a primary reason for the novel's commercial failure was the fact t...
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In the following essay, Morash analyzes three Famine novels in relation to the Malthusian principles of population—that an "unchecked" population will increase at a much higher ra...
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In the following survey of Famine poetry, Morash claims that the Famine "left the poets of the 1840s abandoned by tradition," citing the difficulties the poets experienced trying to resp...
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The following is an introduction to Scottish writer Alexander Somerville's Letters from Ireland (the letters were originally published at the time of their composition [1847 in newspaper report...
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Prosperity; the word can either be acquired or earned in a real life situation. Through hard work, perseverance, and determination, many people are able to acquire whatever they want. What happens wh...
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