The Body In Pain In Irish Literature And Culture (new Directions In Irish And Irish American Literature)

This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed in this collection covers diverse cultural forms, from reports of battles and executions to stage and screen representations of sexual violence, produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain – whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated – is culturally coded. Pain is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Ireland’s literary and cultural history. Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction: The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture....Pages 1-19 Where Does It Hurt? How Pain Makes History in Early Modern Ireland....Pages 21-38 ‘Most barbarously and inhumaine maner butchered’: Masculinity, Trauma, and Memory in Early Modern Ireland’....Pages 39-55 ‘Those Savage Days of Memory’: John Temple and His Narrative of the 1641 Uprising....Pages 57-75 Severed Heads and Floggings: The Undermining of Oblivion in Ulster in the Aftermath of 1798....Pages 77-97 ‘Tá mé ag imeacht’: The Execution of Myles Joyce and Its Afterlives....Pages 99-115 Pain, Trauma, and Memory in the Irish War of Independence: Remembering and Contextualising Irish Suffering....Pages 117-134 Pain, Pleasure, and Revolution: The Body in Roger Casement’s Writings....Pages 135-148 ‘Targets of Shame’: Negotiating the Irish Female Migrant Experience in Kathleen Nevin’s You’ll Never Go Back (1946) and Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle (1936)....Pages 149-166 ‘Intertextual Quotation’: Troubled Irish Bodies and Jewish Intertextual Memory in Colum McCann’s ‘Cathal’s Lake’ and ‘Hunger Strike’....Pages 167-182 The Vulnerable Body on Stage: Reading Interpersonal Violence in Rape as Metaphor....Pages 183-198 Recovery and Forgetting: Haunting Remains in Northern Irish Culture....Pages 199-215 ‘That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?’: The Spectre of Misogyny in The Fall ....Pages 217-234 ‘The Art of Grief’: Irish Women’s Poetry of Loss and Healing....Pages 235-252 Back Matter....Pages 253-283