Books on Ireland

Ireland
Connolly, S. J. Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Survey of the “long 18th century” in Irish history that regards 1688–1691 not as a critical disjuncture but rather as confirming a Protestant ascendancy established at the Restoration. Examines the social, legal, and religious underpinnings of Protestant landed hegemony and argues for an ancien régime model instead of a colonial one.
Hayton, David. Ruling Ireland, 1685–1742: Politics, Politicians and Parties. Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2004. Essays by a master of 18th-century Irish political history. Lead essay analyzes 1685–1691 as involving two potential revolutions, an abortive Jacobite Catholic revolution, and a successful Williamite revolution that confirmed Protestant ascendancy. Other essays examine the post-revolutionary development of the Irish parliament, the emergence of parties, and Anglo-Irish connections.
Léoutre, Marie. “Contesting and Upholding the Rights of the Irish Parliament in 1698: The Arguments of William Molyneux and Simon Clement.” Parliaments, Estates & Representation 34.1 (2014): 22–39. Was Ireland an independent kingdom or merely a dependency like England’s developing colonies? The question was starkly raised by the English Parliament’s 1698–1699 decision to regulate Irish woolen exports over Irish objections. The Irish intellectual Molyneux argued for Irish parliamentary autonomy, while the English Clement maintained the opposite. DOI: 10.1080/02606755.2014.891785
MaGuire, J. I. “The Irish Parliament of 1692.” In Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1800. Edited by Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton, 1–31. Belfast, UK: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979. Essential article about the short Irish parliament that sat after the Jacobite defeat. McGuire detects the first signs of emerging political parties in opposition to the Treaty of Limerick (which ended the conflict), in hostility to William’s Irish officials, and in concerns about Protestant landholdings.
Maguire, W. A., ed. Kings in Conflict: The Revolutionary War in Ireland and Its Aftermath, 1689–1750. Belfast, UK: Blackstaff, 1990. Essays about the military conflict of 1688–1691, its origins, and its consequences, intended for general readers and students. Authors include Maguire, John Miller, David Hayton, and S. J. Connolly. Carefully chosen illustrations complement the text. Places Irish struggle in the broader European context.
McGrath, Charles Ivan. “Securing the Protestant Interest: The Origins and Purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695.” Irish Historical Studies 30 (1996): 25–46. Examines the fallout for Catholics of their failure in the Williamite war: two penal laws of 1695, one of which disarmed them and the other of which forbade their education abroad. Suggests the English government actively supported Irish Protestants in this legislation in order to provide greater wartime security.
Sherry, John. “Scottish Presbyterian Networks in Ulster and the Irish House of Commons, 1692–1714.” Parliaments, Estates & Representation 33.2 (2013): 120–139. The postrevolutionary Anglo-Irish Ascendancy regarded the flourishing Scots Presbyterian population of Ulster as a new threat almost as great as that of the Catholic majority. However, how did Ulster MPs actually operate within the Irish Commons; and how did the Irish parliament’s anti-dissenting legislation impact the Ulster Scots? DOI: 10.1080/02606755.2013.845346
Simms, J. G. Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91. Dublin, Ireland, and Portland, OR: Four Courts, 2000. Originally published in 1969. Reissue of the pioneering historical narrative of Ireland during the reign of James II and the Jacobite–Williamite conflict. Examines the Catholic revival, the Jacobite parliament of 1689, the military campaigns and battles, and the major personalities.
Block, Kristen, and Jenny Shaw. “Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean.” Past & Present 210.1 (2011): 33–60. Examines the cultural and political complexity of the Irish place within the Caribbean. Shows how emigres continually flitted across Anglo-Spanish borders and provided an object of suspicion for Protestant governors. Argues that the transition toward an economy based on African slavery marked out the Irish more clearly as upholders of the ruling social order in the English West Indies. DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtq059
Cullen, L. M. “The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800. Edited by Nicholas Canny, 113–150. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Frames Irish movement into the colonies as one element in a diverse early modern diaspora, taking in a higher proportion of the country’s population than the better-known migrations of the 19th century. Argues that Irish mobility was the product of decisions “more conscious and less involuntary” than in later centuries, guided by elite military and commercial strategies. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198204190.003.0006
Truxes, Thomas M. Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Detailed analysis of Irish economic expansion. Discusses the freedoms available to Irish traders within the British Empire, and shows how commercial opportunities arose partly within the parameters of the Navigation Act, but also due to limits in the state’s power of enforcement. Comments on the increasing diversity of Irish engagement, through imports and exports, in the economics of empire.
Haakonssen, Knud, ed. Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. This collection of essays explores the importance of rational dissent in shaping 18th- century education, law, and political radicalism. Several contributions highlight the impact on Scotland and Ireland. The volume as a whole emphasizes the importance of religion to the Enlightenment.
Sheehan, John, and Donnchadh Ó Corráin, eds. The Viking Age: Ireland and the West: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Viking Congress. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2010. Many but by no means all of these papers focus on Ireland.
Britnell, Richard. Britain and Ireland 1050–1550: Economy and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Important overview, not only of England, by an author who has contributed much to discussion of the role of commerce in shaping late medieval society. Examines more than just the economy and trade, however, considering evidence of ethnicity, expression of “national” sentiments, and the contrasting restraints of custom that affected England and Scotland. It also summarizes agricultural practice and productivity.
Fissel, Mark Charles. English Warfare, 1511–1642. London: Routledge, 2001. Part of the excellent Warfare and History series from Routledge. This fine study concentrates on warfare per se, including the structure and supply of armies and their actions on campaign—including Tudor forces in Ireland, the suppression of the Northern Rising of 1569–1570, and English interventions such as in the Netherlands and Portugal. Concludes that there was an English “art of war” deriving from a martial culture emphasizing flexibility in the face of unusually diverse challenges.
Sneddon, Andrew. Possessed by the Devil: The Real History of the Islandmagee Witches and Ireland’s Only Mass Witchcraft Trial. Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2013. While it is generally believed that Ireland had little-to-no witch hunting, Sneddon analyzes the only known case of a significant trial in the country in 1711 in County Antrim; although with nine accused, this hardly can be called a “mass” trial. Reveals the important role of Protestant clergy in the accusations, which began with a woman claiming to have been possessed by the devil as a result of witchcraft.
Laing, Lloyd R. The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland, c. AD 400–1200. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. A much better book than the original 1975 version, this covers the same geographical spread as Hines 2000 but focuses on the material culture that underpins study of the non-Anglo-Saxon world.
Glasscoe, Marion, ed. The Medieval Mystical Tradition: England, France, Ireland, and Wales. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1999. The 6th Exeter Symposium devoted to the topic, with papers looking at the important individuals, mysticism as a subtopic, and Carmelite spirituality. All the volumes edited by Glasscoe and coming out of the Exeter Symposium are of value; they too combine work on mystics and on anchorites, and offer comparative material on England and the Continent.
Jenkins, Geraint H. “Wales in the Eighteenth Century.” In A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain. Edited by H. T. Dickinson, 392–402. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. An overview of Wales in this period, with helpful pointers toward further reading.
Bartlett, Thomas. The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1992. Examines the political struggle to obtain rights for Catholics in a country where Protestants saw themselves as the nation.
Connolly, S. J. Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Focuses on the Protestant north and pays particular attention to how Protestants were compelled to change their underlying assumptions of identity to fit with the reality of the preindustrial society in which they lived.
Dickson, David, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds. The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion. Dublin, Ireland: Lilliput, 1993. Study of the radical/revolutionary movement in the 1790s.
Kelly, James. “The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800.” Irish Historical Studies 25 (1987): 236–263. Nicely lays out the shifts in attitudes that brought about the Union.
Morley, Vincent. Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Examines how Ireland viewed the American Revolution, suggesting that the polarities of the 1790s were already there by the end of the war.
Brockliss, Laurence, and David Eastwood, eds. A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–c. 1850. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997. The focus of this book is on the period after 1815, when Colley’s anti-French/anti-Catholic thesis seems an inadequate explanation for national identity after union with Ireland.
Claydon, Tony, and Ian McBride, eds. Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. This useful set of essays, particularly good on Ireland, challenges commonly held notions that Protestant religion was a unifying force in the British Isles. The editors seek here to delve beneath platitudes about the place of religion in the 18th century and find a deeper understanding of the place and influence of the Protestant faith in British nation building. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560439
Pittock, Murray G. H. Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997. Stresses the tensions within the process of creating a national identity.
Smyth, Jim. The Making of the United Kingdom, 1660–1800: State, Religion, and Identity in Britain and Ireland. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001. Useful textbook on this issue; Smyth stresses the importance of the different but not separate national narratives of the four component peoples of modern Britain.
Barry, Terry. The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland. London: Methuen 1987. Did for Ireland what Clarke 1984 (cited under British Isles) did for England, with chapters on fortifications, rural settlement, towns, and other mainstays of archaeology—tellingly, after a brief section on the documentary evidence.
Coulson, Charles. Castles in Medieval Society. Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. To produce a book on castles without a single illustration is an achievement of a sort, but is symptomatic of the density of this book, which goes off on tangents somewhat too readily. It is, however, the place to look for discussion of the imprecision of words like “castelle,” of the nature of serjeanties and castle-guard, of royal rights over their subjects’ castles—rather limited by convention—and of women in castles as more than passive
Saunders, Andrew. Fortress Britain: An Artillery Fortification in the British Isles and Ireland. Liphook, UK: Beaufort, 1989. Goes well beyond the Middle Ages, but is the best introduction to the progressive introduction of gunports rather than arrow slits into castle and town walls, followed by special-purpose towers, as at Norwich and Southampton, and then by a few down-river towers to prevent ships getting up to a port, as on the River Dart. Henry VIII’s provision of a state-run defensive system had long-term consequences.
O’Meara, J. J., ed. The Voyage of St. Brendan: Journey to the Promised Land. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976. The tale of St. Brendan’s adventures is a Christianized version of the older pagan, Irish travel tale and was widely read in medieval Europe.
Bradley, John. Viking Dublin Exposed: The Wood Quay Saga. Dublin, Ireland: O’Brien, 1984. An archaeologist’s view of the controversy about the rescue excavation in downtown Dublin.
Clarke, Howard B., Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, and Raghnall Ó Floinn, eds. Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 1998. Papers on archaeological, historical, and literary sources of our knowledge about the Vikings in Ireland, from a 1995 conference.
Heffernan, Thomas Farel. Wood Quay: The Clash over Dublin’s Viking Past. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Written for the general reader, bringing Viking city remains to the attention of historic preservationists.
Larsen, Anne-Christine, ed. The Vikings in Ireland. Roskilde, Denmark: The Viking Ship Museum, 2001. A collection of articles published to accompany an exhibition co-organized by the National Museum of Ireland and the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark.
Philpott, Fiona A. A Silver Saga: Viking Treasure from the North West. Liverpool, UK: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1990. A catalogue of metal finds from Ireland and around the Irish Sea.
Sheehan, John, and Donnchadh Ó Corráin, eds. The Viking Age: Ireland and the West: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Viking Congress. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2010. Papers on many aspects of the Vikings in Ireland placed into the context of Viking expansion to the west.
Valante, Mary A. The Vikings in Ireland: Settlement, Trade and Urbanization. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2008. Examines the relationship between Vikings in Dublin with the rural Irish through Irish annals, Old Norse sagas, and archaeology.
A unique cultural historical examination of the true life case of a woman who disappeared in rural Ireland in 1895. Her father and brother claimed that she had been abducted by fairies, and her burnt body was eventually recovered by the police. Bourke provides an intriguing critique of fairy belief in Ireland just as writers of the Irish Revival were publishing prose and poetry on traditional beliefs in fairies among some rural communities in Ireland.
Collins, Kevin. Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2002. The most important study of the role of the Catholic Church in the Irish Revival. Particularly valuable in identifying the relationship between cultural nationalism and Catholic religious practice and for its discussion of the role of the national seminary, Maynooth College, in the revival of the Irish language.
Hooper, Glenn, ed. Landscape and Empire, 1770–2000. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
Essays written in the spirit of Cosgrove and emphasizing landscape as ideological construct. Studies the impact on landscape of colonial contact, primarily on the British Empire. Topics ranging from maps of Ireland to women’s travel writing from the West Indies. Discusses modern representations of postcolonial landscapes with essays on Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Colm Toibin.
Collins, Timothy, ed. Decoding the Landscape: Contributions toward a Synthesis of Thinking in Irish Studies on the Landscape. Galway, UK: Centre for Landscape Studies, Social Sciences Research Centre, National University of Ireland, 2003.
Multidisciplinary collection with essays on early Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon literature’s representation of nature, studies of settlement before the famine, landscape change in the Connemara region, and the idea of place as text in Yeats.
Cusick, Christine. Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts. Cork, UK: Cork University Press, 2010.
Collection examining Irish literature through an ecocritical lens. Authors discussed include Lady Morgan, J. M. Synge, Paula Meehan, and Edna O’Brien. Topics include the impact of colonialism, tourism, and diaspora and their effects on depictions of landscape.
Duffy, Patrick J. Exploring the History and Heritage of Irish Landscapes. Dublin, UK: Four Courts, 2007.
Concentrates on the past five hundred years of Irish landscape, highlighting major themes in the making of landscape and the study of its evolution. Includes separate chapters on natural, cultural, built, visualized, and written landscapes. A starting point for students of landscape history.
Gillmor, Desmond, ed. The Irish Countryside: Landscape, Wildlife, History, People. Dublin, UK: Wolfhound, 1989.
Chapters written by geographers reviewing topics such as physical landscape, wildlife evolution, human landscape, and folk life. Designed for nonspecialists with a general interest in rural Ireland.
Ní Bhroiméil, Úna, and Glenn Hooper, eds. Land and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Dublin, UK: Four Courts, 2008.
Surveys literary representations of the natural environment in popular and canonical literature, poetry and fiction (including ballads), and Edgeworth’s novels, and examines how concepts of the picturesque and sublime translate onto an Irish setting.
Smyth, William J. Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c.1530–1750. Cork, UK: Cork University Press, 2006.
Compares “proper” territorial organization with Irish ways of remembrance and use of landscape to define and defend patrimonies. Subverts maps to reveal hidden worlds while pointing out how the “new Ireland” was mapped to reveal English intentions. Uses regional case studies to analyze the geography of conquest, resistance, and settlement.
Wenzell, Tim. Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.
Traces Irish writers’ relationship to nature, from early Christianity to the post-Celtic Tiger age. Argues that Irish writers’ political perspectives should be subordinate to, or at least balanced with, their relationship to nature. Discusses Edgeworth, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Kavanaugh, and Heaney.
Williams, William H. A. Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-famine Ireland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
Examines how travel writing contributed to the representations and stereotypes of the Irish land and its people, in particular how the picturesque aesthetics dealt with religious differences and the poverty that came to be a dominating theme in all writing about Ireland by English tourists.
McCracken, Eileen. The Irish Woods since Tudor Times. Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1971.
Includes the history of certain tree types, naming traditions, and distribution maps. Addresses traditions and theories regarding the Irish woodlands, with an emphasis on timber use for trade, housing, and industry.
Siewers, Alfred K. Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Using strategies from ecocriticism and phenomenology, Siewers explores the trope of the “Otherworld” in early Irish Sea narratives. The Otherworld landscape is read iconographically as a liminal space where nature is defined in the boundary between the human and nonhuman. Theoretically ambitious but provides a provocative model for reading premodern representations of landscape. DOI: 10.1057/9780230100527
Keneally, Thomas. Three Famines. Sydney, Australia: Vintage, 2010.
A graphic account of three historical famines: the Great Irish Famine, the Bengal Famine of 1943, and the Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and 1980s.
Daly, Mary. The Famine in Ireland. Dublin, Ireland: Dublin Historical, 1986.
A useful short introduction to the history of the 1840s famine, which has generated criticism from other historians for its “austerely clinical tone.”
Daly, Mary. “Revisionism and Irish History: The Great Famine.” In The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy. Edited by D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, 71–89. London: Routledge, 1996.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203292419
An engaging rejoinder by Daly to some of the criticisms leveled against famine revisionist historiography, including her decisive rebuttal of the genocide thesis.
Daly, Mary. “Historians and the Famine: A Beleaguered Species?” Irish Historical Studies 30.120 (November 1997): 591–601.
A survey of trends in famine historiography as they had emerged during the first years of the commemorative period.
Donnelly, James. S. “Constructing the Memory of the Famine, 1850–1900.” In The Great Irish Potato Famine. Edited by James Donnelly, 209–245. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2002.
A detailed investigation of how a particular political interpretation of the famine was constructed by late-19th-century nationalists, including an independently minded examination of the circulation of John Mitchel’s writings and the emergence of the “Mitchelite” genocide thesis. This is a strongly interrogative, while sympathetic, analysis of populist and nationalist understandings.
Edwards, R. Dudley, and T. Desmond Williams, eds. The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1854–1852. Dublin, Ireland: Browne and Nolan, 1956.
Though published in 1956, some of the essays in this volume (for example Roger McHugh’s study of “The Famine in Irish Oral Tradition”) remain of interest while the volume overall has come to be seen as marking a watershed in Irish revisionist historiography.
Lee, Joseph. “The Famine as History.” In Famine 150: Commemorative Lecture Series. Edited by Cormac Ó Gráda, 159–175. Dublin, Ireland: Teagasc and University College Dublin, 1997.
A lively and perceptive survey of trends in famine historiography that bears useful comparison with Daly’s survey article from the same year.
Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Making History in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s: The Saga of the Great Famine.” In Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938–1994. Edited by Ciarán Brady, 269–287. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 1994.
A fascinating examination of the history behind the delayed publication of Edwards and Williams’s Great Famine.
Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962.
An immediate best seller, this study remains popular and is arguably the most widely known book of Irish history. Both criticized and acclaimed for its vivid rendering of the horrors of starvation and disease, it was especially pioneering in its deployment of contemporary eyewitness accounts along with government reports and publications.
Gray, Peter. The Irish Famine. New York: Abrams, 1995.
A succinct yet wide-ranging account, this is one of the most useful introductions to the history of the Irish Famine. Its closing section, on “documents,” includes a well-chosen selection of contemporary and modern literary sources.
Gray, Peter. Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–1850. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 1999.
Gray’s study of the making of Britain’s Irish policy in the period preceding and during the Great Famine is a decisive intervention in the historiographical controversy surrounding government responsibility. It provides a detailed and persuasive analysis of the ideological forces underlying government policy and administrative decisions.
Kerr, Donal A. A Nation of Beggars? Priests, People, and Politics in Famine Ireland 1846–1852. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
This is the first full account of the role of the Irish Catholic Church in the Great Famine of 1846 and its aftermath, and it has been praised for both its analysis of the operations of ecclesiastical high politics and of the grassroots activism of local priests, including the involvement of many priests in the run-up to the Young Ireland Rebellion.
Kinealy, Christine. This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1994.
Kinealy’s work focuses on the administration of relief and includes a detailed analysis of the operation of the amended poor law, building to a strong and persuasive indictment of the government’s policy of relief in the period.
Mokyr, Joel. Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850. London: Allen and Unwin, 1983.
Mokyr’s pioneering study revised earlier estimates of famine mortality, criticizing previous historians’ over-reliance on census data and the resulting undercounting of famine-related deaths. His estimate of “overall excess mortality” in the years 1846–1851 of 1.08 million (excluding averted births) and 1.498 million (if included) has been generally accepted.
Ó Gráda, Cormac. The Great Irish Famine. London: Macmillan, 1989.
This slim volume remains influential and useful, and is a good introduction to Ó Gráda’s immense body of work on the famine.
Ó Gráda, Cormac. Black ‘47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
This interdisciplinary study effectively combines an historical examination of famine demography and the identity of famine’s “winners and losers” with a vivid account of the famine in Dublin city and a suggestive critique of later concepts of “famine memory.”
Póirtéir, Cathal, ed. The Great Irish Famine. Dublin, Ireland: Mercier, 1995.
First published to coincide with the Thomas Davis Radio Lecture Series, this remains a popular collection of essays with topics ranging from “food and famine,” souperism, the Poor Law eviction and emigration, to folk memory, literature, and the link between “the Great Famine and today’s famines.”
Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Famine.” Victorian Literature and Culture 32.1 (2004): 193–207. Taking its cue from Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Brantlinger’s review article examines the significance of the turn to economic history in work on the famine. DOI: 10.1017/S1060150304000440
Donnelly, James S. The Great Irish Potato Famine. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2002.
Largely based on Donnelly’s contributions to the 1989 New History of Ireland, volume, this is a lively, engaging history featuring illuminating studies of relief administration, famine evictions, and emigration. The final chapter, on the emergence of a famine “public memory,” marks an exemplary combination of persuasive critique and sympathetic analysis.
Gray, Peter, and Kendrick Oliver, eds. The Memory of Catastrophe. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.
This volume is an important contribution to the growing comparative historiography on famine memory, including Gray’s analysis of the Irish Famine along with studies of the English Civil War, “the Titanic and the commodification of catastrophe,” and the memory of catastrophe in Vietnam, Croatia, and Kosovo.
Kinealy, Christine. The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion. London: Palgrave, 2002.
Focuses on a number of thematically organized “contexts” rather than a general history, including charity and religious response, and the significance of the 1990s commemorative period. Its key argument is its controversial and contested claim that Ireland did not suffer a real deficit of food in 1846–1847.
Ó Gráda, Cormac. Ireland’s Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Dublin, Ireland: UCD, 2006.
Includes four previously unpublished essays along with essays co-authored with other leading famine scholars (Mokyr, Andrés Eiríksson, Timothy Guinnane, and Kevin O’Rourke). The perspectives range from socioeconomic history and comparative studies to new analyses of famine historiography, including the “making of famine history in Ireland in 1995.”
Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Making Famine History.” Journal of Economic Literature 65.1 (2007): 5–38. Reviews contributions to the economics and economic history of famine and seeks to a provide a context for the unique history of famine in the 20th century, with reference to Stalin’s famines, 1940s Bengal, and the Chinese Famine of 1959–1961. DOI: 10.1257/jel.45.1.5
Coogan, Tim Pat. The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Coogan’s impassioned restatement of the charge of genocide made this history immediately controversial following publication. Heavily reliant on earlier famine histories, it fails to advance any substantially new historical argument, and his thesis that “Irish historians as a class have not done justice to the Famine” fails to convince.
Delaney, Enda. The Curse of Reason: The Great Irish Famine. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 2012.
Delaney chooses to individuate his narrative history through detailed accounts of four key “actors” (Catholic Archbishop John MacHale, John Mitchel, landlord Elizabeth Smith, and Charles Trevelyan). His explicit objective is to achieve a more “intimate view” of the historical disaster, which has limited success and contains some jarring rhetorical flourishes.
Kelly, John. The Graves are Walking: The History of the Great Irish Famine. New York: Henry Holt, 2012.
Kelly’s history is at its best in its analysis of 19th-century political policy and brings vividly to life the material and human consequences of policy implementation. However, its coverage finishes prematurely in 1847, with a rushed survey of the post-1848 period in its afterword.
Mac Suibhne, Breandán. “A Jig in the Poorhouse.” Dublin Review of Books 38 (July 2013).
Published in the online Dublin Review of Books, Mac Suibhne’s substantial essay is a provocative and incisive review of recent famine publications, including Coogan, Kelly, Delaney, Ó Murchadha and Crowley, et al. 2012 (cited under Geographical and Regional Studies).
Nally, David P. Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.
Nally posits a comparative study of colonialism that sets the Irish experience in the context of colonial famines as a product of “structural violence,” examining the role of “political violence” and colonial ideologies in producing a catastrophic famine.
Noack, Christian, Lindsay Janssen, and Vincent Comerford, eds. Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland. London: Anthem, 2012.
A rare comparative study that treats the Great Irish Famine and the Ukranian Holodomor (1932–1933). The volume is especially illuminating with regard to the comparative construction of national historical narratives, including an enlightening essay on historian Canon John O’Rourke (author of the first substantial famine history, 1875) by Vincent Comerford.
Ó Murchadha, Ciarán. The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony 1845–1852. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.
Offers a new synthesis of the history of the Great Irish Famine, with particular attention to eyewitness accounts and contemporary sources relating to the famine in Clare. It builds on the author’s earlier study of local history and draws on other localized studies of the famine’s impact.
Cowman, Des, and Donald Brady, eds. The Famine in Waterford 1845–1850: Teacht na bPrátaí Dubha. Waterford and Dublin, UK: Geography, 1995.
A collection of essays that includes a study of local newspapers, instances of resistance and their sequels, the operation of the Poor Law, and other aspects of the famine in Waterford.
Crowley, John, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy, eds. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2012.
A monumental contribution to Irish famine studies and to Irish historiography. The use of GIS technology to link civil parish maps to a census database makes the regional impact of the famine dramatically visible. The Atlas’s “geography of the dead” also highlights the extent of urban mortality in unparalleled ways.
Kennedy, Liam, Paul Ell, Margaret Crawford, and Leslie Clarkson, eds. Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decades. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 1999.
Traces the devastating impact of the 1840s Irish Famine through the medium of maps, diagrams, and commentary. The changes wrought by the crisis are shown at the detailed level of the county and of the Poor Law union or barony, wherever possible.
Kinealy, Christine, and Gerard MacAtasney. The Hidden Famine: Poverty, Hunger and Sectarianism in Belfast. London: Pluto, 2000.
A study of the impact of famine on Belfast that challenges previously held views that its impact on the province of Ulster was minimal. The authors examine the impact of the cholera epidemic on Belfast in 1849–1850, the city’s recovery post-famine, and the beginnings of open sectarianism.
Ó Murchadha, Ciarán. Sable Wings Over the Land: Ennis, County Clare and Its Wider Community. Clare, Ireland: Clare Local Studies Project, 1998.
A detailed case study of the town of Ennis and its rural hinterland during the famine period. Draws on local newspapers and local sources to create a richly illuminating study of one of the regions most deeply affected by the famine.
Scally, Robert. The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
A highly influential micro-study of the crown estate of Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, which traces in detail the impact of events: including a rent strike on the estate and an assisted emigrant scheme which sent 225 people to New York in 1847–1848.
Whelan, Kevin. “Pre and Post-Famine Landscape Change.” In The Great Irish Famine. Edited by Cathal Póirtéir, 19–33. Dublin, Ireland: Mercier, 1995.
A useful introduction to social and economic patterns of settlement in the pre-famine period and the changes brought by famine.
Crawford, E. Margaret, ed. The Hungry Stream: Essays on Emigration and Famine. Belfast, Ireland: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997.
A wide-ranging collection of essays that includes Robert Scally (on external factors promoting emigration), Janet Nolan (on emigration by women), Paddy Duffy on “emigrants and the estate office,” David Fitzpatrick (on famine representations in letters to Australia), and Donald Akenson (on the lexicon of famine terms such as “exile” and “diaspora”).
Fitzpatrick, David, ed. Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Emigration to Australia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
An examination of personal correspondence by emigrants largely in the post-famine period, the volume reproduces a total of 111 letters, with fourteen sequences of letters in both directions, and provides a vivid detailed commentary and thematic analysis.
Gribben, Arthur, ed. The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
A diverse collection including essays on the oral tradition (Patricia Lysaght), Irish traditional music (Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin), Grosse Île (Michael Quigley), and emigrants’ recollections (Kerby Miller).
King, Jason, “The Genealogy of Famine Diary in Ireland and Quebec: Ireland’s Famine Migration in Historical Fiction, Historiography and Memory.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 45–69. An engaging study of the publishing history and reception of Gerald Keegan’s Famine Diary (1991), which usefully illuminates its contested status as famine memoir or famine fiction. DOI: 10.1353/eir.2012.0011
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
In an award-winning social history of Irish emigration to North America, Miller seeks to reproduce the thought and behavior of “ordinary” Irish emigrants, as revealed in personal diaries, letters, journals and memories as well as poetry, song, and folklore.
Neal, Frank. Black ‘47: Britain and the Famine Irish. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
An acclaimed history of famine emigration to Britain, this study focuses on one year and examines refugee immigration, the conditions under which the refugees were carried to Britain, the relief operations mounted, and the typhus epidemic in Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, South Wales, and the northeast of Britain.
O’Neill, Kevin. “The Star-Spangled Shamrock: Memory and Meaning in Irish America.” In History and Memory in Modern Ireland. Edited by Ian McBride, 118–138. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Examines the evolution of a social memory of famine in mid-19th century Irish America, and its connection with the complex history of Irish involvement in the American Civil War.
O’Sullivan, Patrick, ed. The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage and Identity. Vol. 6, The Meaning of the Famine. London: Leicester University Press, 1997.
The final volume in a wide-ranging six-volume series, this book includes essays on famine historiography, literature and philanthropy, as well as studies of famine emigration relating to Canada, England, Wales, and Australia. Its final essay, “on the Irish Famine and the development of famine policy and famine theory” is especially suggestive.
Crawford, E. Margaret, ed. The Hungry Stream: Essays on Emigration and Famine. Belfast, Ireland: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997.
A wide-ranging collection of essays that includes Robert Scally (on external factors promoting emigration), Janet Nolan (on emigration by women), Paddy Duffy on “emigrants and the estate office,” David Fitzpatrick (on famine representations in letters to Australia), and Donald Akenson (on the lexicon of famine terms such as “exile” and “diaspora”).
Fitzpatrick, David, ed. Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Emigration to Australia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
An examination of personal correspondence by emigrants largely in the post-famine period, the volume reproduces a total of 111 letters, with fourteen sequences of letters in both directions, and provides a vivid detailed commentary and thematic analysis.
Gribben, Arthur, ed. The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
A diverse collection including essays on the oral tradition (Patricia Lysaght), Irish traditional music (Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin), Grosse Île (Michael Quigley), and emigrants’ recollections (Kerby Miller).
King, Jason, “The Genealogy of Famine Diary in Ireland and Quebec: Ireland’s Famine Migration in Historical Fiction, Historiography and Memory.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 45–69. An engaging study of the publishing history and reception of Gerald Keegan’s Famine Diary (1991), which usefully illuminates its contested status as famine memoir or famine fiction. DOI: 10.1353/eir.2012.0011
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
In an award-winning social history of Irish emigration to North America, Miller seeks to reproduce the thought and behavior of “ordinary” Irish emigrants, as revealed in personal diaries, letters, journals and memories as well as poetry, song, and folklore.
Neal, Frank. Black ‘47: Britain and the Famine Irish. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. An acclaimed history of famine emigration to Britain, this study focuses on one year and examines refugee immigration, the conditions under which the refugees were carried to Britain, the relief operations mounted, and the typhus epidemic in Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, South Wales, and the northeast of Britain.
O’Neill, Kevin. “The Star-Spangled Shamrock: Memory and Meaning in Irish America.” In History and Memory in Modern Ireland. Edited by Ian McBride, 118–138. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Examines the evolution of a social memory of famine in mid-19th century Irish America, and its connection with the complex history of Irish involvement in the American Civil War.
O’Sullivan, Patrick, ed. The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage and Identity. Vol. 6, The Meaning of the Famine. London: Leicester University Press, 1997.
The final volume in a wide-ranging six-volume series, this book includes essays on famine historiography, literature and philanthropy, as well as studies of famine emigration relating to Canada, England, Wales, and Australia. Its final essay, “on the Irish Famine and the development of famine policy and famine theory” is especially suggestive.

Famine Testimonies
One of the many welcome historiographical developments during the commemorative years of 1995–1998 was the republication of many eyewitness accounts and testimonies; see Killen 1995 for a selected anthology and Somerville 1994 for a contemporary journalistic account. The detailed observations of American observer Asenath Nicholson have been republished in Nicholson 1998, edited by Maureen Murphy. Another vivid testimony is Dorian 2001, a memoir that remained unpublished until 2001. An immensely valuable resource is available in Central Relief Committee 1996, while Carlyle 1882, a diary of Thomas Carlyle’s visit to Ireland, continues to generate extensive critical commentary (see McLean 2004 and Nally 2011, cited under Historical Studies, 2010 and After). Significant differences exist among historians with respect to their estimation of the value of such sources; for a critical view see Fitzpatrick 1997, while McLean 2004 illustrates a complex and nuanced deployment of contemporary testimonies.
Central Relief Committee. Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland in 1846 and 1847. Dublin, Ireland: Edmund Burke, 1996.
A welcome republication of the detailed correspondence and testimonies gathered by the Society of Friends (Quakers), first published in 1852 in Dublin.
Carlyle, Thomas. Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849. London: Sampson Low, 1882.
Carlyle’s Reminiscences, based on his four-day tour of Ireland in 1849 with his friend, the nationalist leader Charles Gavan Duffy, continues to be an influential and controversial commentary. It is the subject of compelling readings in McLean 2004 and Nally 2011 (cited under Historical Studies, 2010 and After).
Dorian, Hugh. The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal. Edited by Breandán Mac Suibhne and David Dickson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2001.
This memoir by schoolteacher Hugh Dorian, a native of Fanaid from north Donegal, was completed in the 1890s but first published in 2001 in an elegant edition by Mac Suibhne and Dickson. The memoir contains a wealth of fascinating social detail, including an account of the experience of famine in north Donegal.
Fitzpatrick, David. “The Failure: Representations of the Irish Famine in Letters to Australia.” In The Hungry Stream: Essays on Famine and Emigration. Edited by E. Margaret Crawford, 161–174. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997.
Contains an important critique of the limits of eyewitness testimonies as historical accounts, arguing provocatively that they reveal more “about the assumptions of the observer than the experience of those observed.”
Killen, John, ed. The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts 1841–1851. Belfast, Ireland: Blackstaff, 1995.
Killen collects a wide range of sources here, including extracts from Dublin, Belfast, and regional newspapers, English journals including the Illustrated London News, and official reports such as those by the Poor Law commissioners and commissioners of public works.
McLean, Stuart. The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
McLean’s study offers a stimulating reconceptualization of the historicity of the famine, exploring the possibility of alternative modes of engagement with historical sources, including eyewitness accounts and oral histories.
Nicholson, Asenath. Annals of the Famine in Ireland. Edited by Maureen Murphy. Dublin, Ireland: Lilliput, 1998.
A valuable new edition of Nicholson’s detailed and illuminating account of her visit to Ireland in 1847–1848, first published in 1851, and containing an excellent introduction and annotations by Murphy.
Somerville, Alexander. Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847. Edited by K. D. M. Snell. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 1994.

Born to a Scottish laboring family, Somerville became a journalist and acclaimed author of The Autobiography of a Working Man (1848). His account of his visit to Ireland in 1847 was first published in 1852 and provides a graphic portrayal of contemporary rural conditions.
Famine Testimonies
One of the many welcome historiographical developments during the commemorative years of 1995–1998 was the republication of many eyewitness accounts and testimonies; see Killen 1995 for a selected anthology and Somerville 1994 for a contemporary journalistic account. The detailed observations of American observer Asenath Nicholson have been republished in Nicholson 1998, edited by Maureen Murphy. Another vivid testimony is Dorian 2001, a memoir that remained unpublished until 2001. An immensely valuable resource is available in Central Relief Committee 1996, while Carlyle 1882, a diary of Thomas Carlyle’s visit to Ireland, continues to generate extensive critical commentary (see McLean 2004 and Nally 2011, cited under Historical Studies, 2010 and After). Significant differences exist among historians with respect to their estimation of the value of such sources; for a critical view see Fitzpatrick 1997, while McLean 2004 illustrates a complex and nuanced deployment of contemporary testimonies.
Central Relief Committee. Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland in 1846 and 1847. Dublin, Ireland: Edmund Burke, 1996.
A welcome republication of the detailed correspondence and testimonies gathered by the Society of Friends (Quakers), first published in 1852 in Dublin.
Carlyle, Thomas. Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849. London: Sampson Low, 1882.
Carlyle’s Reminiscences, based on his four-day tour of Ireland in 1849 with his friend, the nationalist leader Charles Gavan Duffy, continues to be an influential and controversial commentary. It is the subject of compelling readings in McLean 2004 and Nally 2011 (cited under Historical Studies, 2010 and After).
Dorian, Hugh. The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal. Edited by Breandán Mac Suibhne and David Dickson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2001.
This memoir by schoolteacher Hugh Dorian, a native of Fanaid from north Donegal, was completed in the 1890s but first published in 2001 in an elegant edition by Mac Suibhne and Dickson. The memoir contains a wealth of fascinating social detail, including an account of the experience of famine in north Donegal.
Fitzpatrick, David. “The Failure: Representations of the Irish Famine in Letters to Australia.” In The Hungry Stream: Essays on Famine and Emigration. Edited by E. Margaret Crawford, 161–174. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997.
Contains an important critique of the limits of eyewitness testimonies as historical accounts, arguing provocatively that they reveal more “about the assumptions of the observer than the experience of those observed.”
Killen, John, ed. The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts 1841–1851. Belfast, Ireland: Blackstaff, 1995.
Killen collects a wide range of sources here, including extracts from Dublin, Belfast, and regional newspapers, English journals including the Illustrated London News, and official reports such as those by the Poor Law commissioners and commissioners of public works.
McLean, Stuart. The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
McLean’s study offers a stimulating reconceptualization of the historicity of the famine, exploring the possibility of alternative modes of engagement with historical sources, including eyewitness accounts and oral histories.
Nicholson, Asenath. Annals of the Famine in Ireland. Edited by Maureen Murphy. Dublin, Ireland: Lilliput, 1998.
A valuable new edition of Nicholson’s detailed and illuminating account of her visit to Ireland in 1847–1848, first published in 1851, and containing an excellent introduction and annotations by Murphy.
Somerville, Alexander. Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847. Edited by K. D. M. Snell. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 1994.
Born to a Scottish laboring family, Somerville became a journalist and acclaimed author of The Autobiography of a Working Man (1848). His account of his visit to Ireland in 1847 was first published in 1852 and provides a graphic portrayal of contemporary rural conditions.

Irish Famine Literature in English
In 1995 Terry Eagleton contentiously observed of Irish Famine literature: “There is a handful of novels and a body of poems, but few truly distinguished works. Where is the Famine in the literature of the Revival? Where is it in Joyce?” (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, p. 13). Since then a series of critics have established the existence of a large body of Irish Famine literature and, relatedly, have reshaped critical understanding of what constitutes a famine literary text. The sections below are designed to guide readers to this diversity of texts and to the key critical articles that have accompanied these acts of literary retrieval.
Critical Studies
Eagleton 1995 served as a touchstone for later critics such as Morash 1995, Kelleher 1997, Fegan 2002, and Bigelow 2003. In Cusack and Goss 2006, critical categorizations of what may be termed “famine literature” have been greatly extended to include Stoker’s Dracula, Synge, and Beckett. (See also section on Critical Studies of Famine Fiction.) Many of these publications emerged during the commemorative years, with Morash and Hayes 1996 providing one of the most original essay collections from that period. Tóibín 1999 provides an especially engaging short introduction to the subject of the famine’s representation in literature.
Bigelow, Gordon. Fiction, Famine and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Chapter 4 “Esoteric Solutions: Ireland and the Colonial Critique of Political Economy” provides an important study of the operations of political economy in Ireland, including a discussion of Asenath Nicholson’s “new domestic economy.” DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511484728
Cusack, George, and Sarah Goss, eds. Hungry Words: Images of Ireland in the Irish Canon. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 2006.
This study of literary representations gathers a wide range of references to hunger and famine, including chapters on famine poetry, the famine writings of Maria Edgeworth and Anthony Trollope, Dracula, Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, Synge, Joyce, Beckett, Frank O’Connor, Tom Murphy, Eavan Boland, and children’s literature, with an afterword by Chris Morash.
Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Eagleton’s contention, in the title essay, that the famine marks “the threatened death of the signifier” is provocative and influential though this argument that a “repression or evasion would seem to be at work in Irish literary culture” has been challenged by subsequent studies.
Fegan, Melissa. Literature and the Irish Famine 1845–1919. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Explores the famine’s legacy in literature, tracing it in the work of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919. Her study examines both fiction and non-fiction, including journalism, travel narratives, and the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope.
Kelleher, Margaret. The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
A study of representations of women in Irish Famine literature, from contemporary testimonies and accounts to literary narratives by Carleton, Trollope, and O’Flaherty and the famine writings of Maud Gonne; it concludes with a comparative study of the literature of the Bengal Famine.
Morash, Chris. Writing the Irish Famine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. In a compelling and influential study, Morash examines literary texts by writers such as William Carleton, Anthony Trollope, James Clarence Mangan, John Mitchel, and Samuel Ferguson to reveal how they interact with histories, sermons, and economic treatises to ensure the memorialization of famine. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182795.001.0001
Morash, Chris, and Richard Hayes, eds. “Fearful Realities”: New Perspectives on the Famine. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic, 1996.
This was one of the first collections of essays published in the commemorative period and remains valuable including Charles Orser’s essay “Can there be an Archaeology of the Great Famine?” and Boylan and Foley’s essay “A Nation Perishing of Political Economy?”
Tóibín, Colm. The Irish Famine. London: Profile Press, 1999.
This extended essay, published in part in London Review of Books the previous year, is highly engaging and suggestive.
Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–2002. 3d rev. ed. London: Harper Perennial, 2004.
Magisterial survey of 20th-century Irish social and cultural history, drawing on a wide variety of documents and creative works. Chapters 7 to 10 cover the period from 1945 to 1980, and Brown argues that social change during 1960s and 1970s fundamentally altered the relationships between artists and writers and Irish society: “the new Ireland . . . put paid to the artist as cultural hero” (p. 299). Originally published in 1981.
Fallon, Brian. An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930–1960. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1998.
Fallon challenges notions that the pre-war, wartime, and post-war years were culturally barren, examining literary works by Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, and Liam O’Flaherty, together with figures from the visual arts including Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett, Louis le Brocquy, and Norah McGuinness.
Ferriter, Diarmaid. The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000. London: Profile, 2004.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 of this expansive social and cultural history cover the years 1945–2000. Ferriter draws on literary texts and journalism alongside official documents.
Foster, Roy. Modern Ireland, 1600–1972. London: Penguin, 1988.
Chapters 22 and 23 make up a small proportion of this accessible and engaging volume, but Foster’s revisionist identification of recurring themes in Irish history is essential reading. Some attitudes expressed toward the legitimacy of Irish Republicanism have proved controversial.
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.
Lengthy study addressing the period from the late 19th to late 20th centuries: later chapters examine Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, and Brian Friel. Draws ambitious connections between the Irish experience and those of other postcolonial societies and cultures, while a series of “interchapters” sketches the socio-cultural context from which the texts emerged.
Lee, J. J. Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Controversial in some quarters due to its promotion of a technocratic idea of development, this book focuses on political and administrative history, but Lee is also attuned to cultural and intellectual matters.
Wills, Clair. The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Following Wills’s groundbreaking cultural history of Ireland and the Second World War, That Neutral Island (2007), this study of post-war Irish emigrant culture examines representations of emigrants from Ireland and of Irish immigrants in Britain in official documents, sociological texts, clerical literature, journalism, drama, literary fiction, and popular literature and film. Wills addresses writers including M. J. Molloy, John B. Keane, Tom Murphy, and Edna O’Brien.
Woodward, Guy. Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Cultural history describing the effects of the war on artists and writers in Northern Ireland. Chapters on autobiographical fiction and on political writing draw on underexamined creative and non-literary works to trace the pressures and influences on writers in the province from the 1940s to 1960s. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716853.001.0001
Allen, Nicholas. Modernism, Ireland and Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Defines modernism as “experimental art that challenges a state whose institutions [. . .] encode other persistent forms of regulation” (p. 5). Argues that Finnegans Wake contains remnants of the Irish Civil War. Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (London: Macmillan, 1926) is considered as a flashpoint for anti-imperial protest. Suggests W. B. Yeats’s A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1926) is an alternative vision of independence. Also considers countercultural literary journals, Samuel Beckett’s novels, and Jack B. Yeats’s art as visions of alternative republics.
Castle, Gregory. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Argues that anthropology is key to the development of modernism in Ireland. Heavily reliant on postcolonial theory, particularly Terry Eagleton. Claims “Anglo-Irish” (p. 3) W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge used colonial methods of cultural production compared to “Catholic-Irish” (p. 6) James Joyce whose critique of the Revival “guaranteed its continued relevance” (p. 5). Suggests that the Revivalists’ primitivism is linked to the modernist search for authenticity to combat the modern condition. Almost exclusively focused on rural, or colonial, Ireland versus metropolitan Ireland. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511485015
Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1987.
Suggests that Irish modernists exploit the moment of transition, the “crisis of culture”(p. 9), in their opposition to a continuous view of past and present. Considers the tension between revivalism and modernism and posits these new terms: “revivalist modernism” to describe authors’ use of tradition and “radical modernism” (p. 14) to describe the antitradition stance. Discusses W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Francis Stuart, among others.
Keown, Edwina, and Carol Taaffe, eds. Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2009.
Asserts Ireland was significant in the development of literary modernism. This interdisciplinary volume considers art, literature, and architecture. Similarly to Longley 2003 (cited under Poetry), suggests the relationship between nation and internationalism/cosmopolitanism was best conceived as interdependence rather than conflict. “Colonial” context emphasized by several contributors. Posits category of “late (or “deferred”) modernism” (p. 5) in the 1940s and 1950s in which Elizabeth Bowen is included. Thomas MacGreevy, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce are prominent throughout.
Dorian, Hugh. The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal. Edited by Breandán Mac Suibhne and David Dickson. Dublin, Ireland: Lilliput, 2000.
Written by a schoolmaster who was born in 1834, this account of life in Fanáid, a thinly populated region near Lough Swilly, also portrays the trials of its community during the Famine years.
Frothingham, Washington.” Blind Peter: Written from His Own Statements. 3d ed. New York: Alvord, 1871.
This autobiographical narrative by Peter Halloran extensively describes his youth in Kilbacanty (later Kilbeacanty), County Galway, including how the Famine affected his home community in 1847.
McCarthy, Justin. An Irishman’s Story. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010.
Originally published in 1904 (London: Macmillan). This memoir, by the famous journalist and member of the Irish Parliamentary Party McCarthy, also goes into the causes and effects of the Great Hunger, which the author witnessed as a young adolescent.
Mitchel, John. The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). Dublin, Ireland: Irishman Office, 1861.
Mitchel’s highly influential history of Ireland in the 1840s includes eyewitness descriptions of the Great Hunger. This nationalist discourse has had a great impact on Famine representations in other genres, such as poetry and fiction.
O’Rourke, John. The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, with Notices of Earlier Irish Famines. Dublin, Ireland: Duffy, 1875.
This seminal Irish historiography contains Canon O’Rourke’s personal recollections of the Famine and incorporates many eyewitness accounts.
Póirtéir, Cathal. Famine Echoes. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1995.
This volume contains recorded interviews with descendants of Famine survivors, who tell stories about the Famine that were passed down to them.
Sullivan, Alexander. New Ireland: Political Sketches and Personal Reminiscences of Thirty Years of Irish Public Life. Glasgow: Cameron and Ferguson, 1877.
In this memoir. Sullivan looks back on the Great Hunger, which he calls “one of the most important events in Irish history for more than two hundred years,” noting, “so much has been destroyed, or so greatly changed that the Ireland of old time will be seen no more” (p. 67).

Travel Narratives
The improvement of roads had made Ireland an attractive destination by the 1820s, and its popularity among tourists did not decrease in the Famine years. Travelers from Great Britain, and America in particular, came to the stricken Emerald Isle, mainly to verify the conditions or to report back to the home front in order to encourage relief. The narratives on Famine Ireland written by British travelers, such as William Bennett and John East, although expressing sympathy for the plight of the Irish, were often informed by imperial bias concerning the conditions of the country and its population. Tourist reports were, moreover, influenced by the early-19th-century tradition of travel writing on Ireland that would define it in terms of the picturesque. As Williams 2010 (cited under Travel Narratives: Critical Studies) observes, discourses of the picturesque, which could be found in texts such as John Christian Curwen’s Observations on the State of Ireland (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1818) and Thomas Kitson Cromwell’s The Irish Tourist; or, Excursions through Ireland (London: Dowding, 1820), would also find their way into the accounts of travelers to Famine Ireland, who many times focused on the beauties of the landscape “to create a comforting distance between themselves and the horrors of the Famine” (p. 184).
Anthologies and Archives
Hadfield and McVeagh 1994 and Hooper 2001 present important overviews of narratives by travelers to 19th-century Ireland, thereby stimulating comparative research. Whereas these anthologies show that critical attention has been primarily directed toward imperial perspectives on Famine Ireland by British travelers, the launch of the digital Famine Archive and Fitzpatrick 1994 underline a growing scholarly interest in the narratives and experiences of Famine emigrants.
Fitzpatrick, David. Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1994.
This collection contains the personal correspondence of Irish emigrants to Australia between 1843 and 1906. Fitzpatrick contextualizes the letters, thereby shedding light on the fate of the Irish of, among others, the Famine generation in the Pacific.
Hadfield, Andrew, and John McVeagh, eds. Strangers to That Land: Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine. Gerrards Cross, UK: Smythe, 1994.
This compilation of British travel writing on Ireland includes excerpts from and discussions of travel accounts written during or in the immediate aftermath of the Famine by, among others, William Bennett and Harriet Martineau.
Hooper, Glenn, ed. The Tourist’s Gaze. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001.
This anthology contains extracts from travel accounts of Ireland during the Famine by, among others, Asenath Nicholson, William Bennett, Spencer T. Hall, and John East.
King, Jason, ed. Famine Archive.
This digital archive, launched in 2012, out of the University of Limerick, offers translations of the annals of the Grey Nuns of Montreal, who played a major role in the care of Famine orphans. The documents provide details about the harrowing conditions of fever-stricken Famine emigrants, who would often die in the quarantine stations, and the adoption of the bereaved children by French Catholic families.

Epistolary Travel Narratives
As the following entries indicate, travel narratives about the conditions in Famine Ireland often took the form of letters written to an (imaginary) audience at home. These epistolary travel accounts frequently seem to be directed toward a wider readership than the addressee; Foster 1847 was published in national newspapers, and Bennett 1847, Dufferin and Boyle 1847, and Somerville 1994 comment in detail on public issues, such as the policies of the British government, the relief works, and the economic status of the tenantry. Gilly 1847 forms an exception: the focus of this travel narrative is the domestic conditions of families and the suffering of mothers, a phenomenon that may be attributable to its having been written by a woman.
Bennett, William. Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland. London: Gilpin, 1847.
As the son of a Quaker, Bennett felt great concern for the suffering of the starving Irish population and in the spring of 1847 visited the country in order to make proposals for a remedy to the food crisis. The account, which is composed of letters that Bennett wrote to his sister, contains poignant representations of the exigencies of the poor.
Dufferin, Lord, and G. G. Boyle. Narrative of a Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen during the Year of the Irish Famine. 3d ed. Oxford: Parker, 1847.
The writers’ account of their travels to Skibbereen vividly portrays the wide-scale destitution to which the region is subject. The people perish with hunger and fever in huts containing “scarcely a single article of furniture or crockery” (p. 13), and the great many dead are often interred without coffins or proper burial rites.
Foster, Thomas Campbell. Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland. London: Chapman and Hall, 1847.
Originally published in 1845–1846, in the Times. The letters, written by the author during a five-month tour of Ireland, from August 1845 to January 1846, describe the outbreak of the blight and the resulting onset of the Famine.

Gilly, W. S., ed. Christmas 1846 and the New Year 1847 in Ireland: Letters from a Lady. Durham, UK: Andrews, 1847. This small volume contains letters from an anonymous lady to the home front during her stay in Ireland in the winter of 1846–1847. The author specifically focuses on the plight of the famishing Irish women, who find themselves unable to provide meals for their families or wean their children.
Somerville, Alexander. Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847. Edited by K. D. M. Snell. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 1994. Originally published in 1847, in the Manchester Examiner. This epistolary account of Somerville’s travels through Ireland during the Great Hunger discuss landlord-tenant relationships; the public works; and tensions between the imperial authorities and the local, suffering population.

Travel Diaries
The entries listed here are travel narratives that are presented in the form of diaries. This use of this generic format by Burritt, Carlyle, and Nicholson may suggest that their texts are primarily personal accounts. However, the writers’ addressing of readerships at home and their engagement with the political rhetoric concerning the Famine reveal that the texts should be interpreted as interventions in the public debate about Ireland’s state and imperial status. Robbins 2006 and Whyte 1848 describe the wretched conditions of Famine emigrants en route to the Americas, thereby confirming the conventional depiction of the transatlantic vessel as the coffin ship―an image that has become almost synonymous with the Famine exodus.
Burritt, Elihu. A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and Its Neighbourhood. London: Gilpin, 1847. The author’s report of a journey to one of the most Famine-afflicted regions of Ireland provides details of the horrors he witnessed, in particular the gruesome appearance of the starving population and the undignified deaths of Famine victims.
Carlyle, Thomas. Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849. New York: Harper, 1882. The Scottish writer shares his observations on the relief works and the commitment of the landlords in Ireland during the Great Hunger. He claims that the “English absentee generally far surpasses the native resident as an owner of land” (p. 98).
Nicholson, Asenath. Annals of the Famine in Ireland. Edited by Maureen Murphy. Dublin, Ireland: Lilliput, 1998. Presenting her “tale of woe” as a text that “should be read by the whole American people” (p. iv), Nicholson’s well-known annals deal with the appalling fate of the famishing Irish and the wretched conditions in the poorhouses as well as the 1848 Young Ireland Rebellion.
Robbins, Edward. “The Memoirs of Edward Robbins, 1800–1853.” In Becoming Irlandés: Private Narratives of the Irish Emigration to Argentina, 1844–1912. Edited by Edmundo Murray, 29–37. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Literature of Latin America, 2006. This text incorporates an account of how Robbins and his relatives fled Ireland during the Famine and how many of the family perished in the crossing or afterward.
Whyte, Robert. The Ocean Plague; or, A Voyage to Quebec in an Irish Emigrant Vessel. Boston: Coolidge and Wiley, 1848. Although the authenticity of this traveldairy has been questioned, the text nevertheless offers an interesting representation of the dire conditions of Irish immigrants onboard the “floating lazar houses” (p. 13), the coffin ships crossing the Atlantic. The text also treats the dreadful circumstances under which surviving immigrants were accommodated at quarantine stations in Quebec or at Grosse Isle.

Travel Reports
The texts cited in this section are written in the style of travel reports and comment not only on the dire state of Ireland’s population, but also on the relief offered to the destitute. Whereas some pamphlets implored charity to the suffering Irish, others expressed the belief that the relief given by British citizens and the London government in the form of public works would stimulate Irish improvidence, as West 1847 also implies. The relief projects introduced by the Peel administration to provide alternative employment to the afflicted agricultural population were also often criticized as useless works that would not bring a long-lasting improvement of Ireland’s state of affairs. Osborne 1850, Smith 1848, and Tuke 1847 engage with this issue of relief and the public discourses concerning it. East 1847 and Hall 1850 bear witness to the sectarianism that lay at the foundation of Famine miseries. Like many of his Protestant contemporaries, East disparages the role of priests during the Famine, a perspective that contrasts with the equally prevalent critique of the Souperists, Evangelicals who sought to convert the famishing. Hall’s observations on the land system expose the conflicts between the farming classes and the nobleman, who frequently was a notorious absentee.
East, John. Glimpses of Ireland in 1847. London: Hamilton, Adams, 1847. A clergyman from Somerset, East traveled to Ireland in April 1847. His account contains many descriptions of the spectral appearance of the famishing population as well as criticism of the influence of priests on the suffering Irish Catholics.
Hall, Spencer T. Life and Death in Ireland, as Witnessed in 1849. Manchester, UK: Parkes, 1850.
The bookseller and printer Hall traveled to Ireland in the spring of 1849. His report includes observations on the appalling state of the country and its people, which in his view, are a disgrace to “a Christian land” (p. 47). Hall also engages with the problematic relationship between absentee landlords and their tenantry.
Osborne, Sydney Godolphin. Gleanings in the West of Ireland. London: T. and W. Boone, 1850. Containing material from columns that the clergyman had previously contributed to the Times, this text reports on Osborne’s visits to relief projects and poorhouses in severely stricken communities in western Ireland.
Smith, William Henry. A Twelve Months’ Residence in Ireland, during the Famine and the Public Works, 1846 and 1847. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848. In this narrative, Smith specifically elaborates on the relief works carried out in Ireland during the Great Hunger, focusing on the works of charity done by English citizens, English officers in Ireland, and the local priesthood.
Tuke, James Hack. A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847. London: Gilpin, 1847. This text provides an account of the travels through Ireland of Tuke, a Quaker philanthropist from York, and his friend William Edward Foster, who distributed relief funds collected by the Society of Friends. The narrative extensively portrays the physical degradation of the wretched population and the dire conditions in local poorhouses.
West, Theresa Cornwallis. A Summer Visit to Ireland in 1846. London: Bentley, 1847. This travel narrative discusses the miserable physical and domestic conditions of the famishing rural population, but is also greatly informed by imperial bias concerning the capacity of the people to better their circumstances.
Hand, Derek. A History of the Irish Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Valuable, accessible, and wide-ranging survey of the form from 1665 to 2010. Contains a chapter on Irish fiction since 1979, in which Hand identifies Irish novelists’ reimagining of time and place as a key area of critical interest. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511975615