SOURCE: "Irish Famine in Literature," in The Great Irish Famine, edited by Cathal Póirtéir, Mercier Press, 1995, pp. 232-47.

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 in preserving and shaping the memory of famine for succeeding generations. "

In William Carleton's famine novel, The Black Prophet, the narrator hesitates before the task of describing a famine victim with the exclamation, 'But how shall we describe it?'¹ Such a question recurs throughout Irish famine literature: can the experience of famine be expressed; is language adequate to a description of famine's horrors? Fears as to language's adequacy in face of overwhelming events also appear in other literary contexts, most famously in writings concerning the Holocaust by George Steiner and others. Steiner's work expresses a further anxiety as to whether...