History: Little more than a decade ago, one would have been excused for thinking that there was no such thing as an "Irish Famine literature".
That was before Chris Morash and Margaret Kelleher re-drew our attention, not only to the vaguely familiar contributions of writers like William Carleton and James Clarence Mangan, but to a scattering of forgotten works, mostly out-of-print and by "minor" authors. Still, the evidence was hardly overwhelming, and in 1995 Terry Eagleton might well ask in Heathcliffe and the Irish Hunger: "Where is the Famine in the Irish Revival? Where is it in Joyce?" Hungry Words offers one answer, since its focus is on how the Famine is represented or implicit in the works of the "big hitters" of Anglo-Irish literature: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Synge, Kavanagh, et al. On the whole, the editors and their team (which, happily, includes Kelleher and Morash) do a good job of it.
If Irish historians once tended towards a Basil Fawlty "don't mention the war" attitude to the Great Famine, for the contributors to this collection the catastrophe is everywhere. Joyce scholar Bonnie Roos reads Leopold and Molly Bloom's inability to come to terms with the loss of their son Rudy as "a metaphor for Ireland's Famine", and insists that to read Ulysses without reference to the Famine is to "miss this 'All important' key". Sarah Goos makes a case for Bram Stoker's Dracula as a gothic "Famine text", while Julieanne Ulin describes Samuel Beckett's Endgame as a Famine play. Yeats's Countess Cathleen and Synge's Playboy are similarly re-interpreted as heavily infused with Famine themes. Christy Mahon is a Famine victim, Cathleen the model of a benevolent landowner, and Dracula a vehicle for recounting Famine memory. This is all great fun, but how seriously should we take it? At one level, it would be surprising if the Great Famine had made no impression on the imaginations of our better-known writers. At another, one is reminded of Paul McCartney's quip that Blue Suede Shoes was a protest song.
Three of the chapters share a connection with Cecil Woodham-Smith's highly influential The Great Hunger, published over four decades ago and still going strong. First, there is a powerful analysis by Nicholas Grene of playwright Tom Murphy's Famine, which (like the Famine poems in Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist) was inspired by Woodham-Smith's book. The limited range of other sources available to a youthful Murphy in his research on the Famine in the mid-1960s - they included Trevelyan's Irish Crisis (1848) and James Connolly's Labour in Ireland (1916) - tells its own story. Second, in November 1962, The Great Hunger prompted an outraged - and outrageous - review in this newspaper from the late Frank O'Connor. Robert Evans's dissection of O'Connor's outburst - which berates poor Woodham-Smith for being soft on genocide - is far too sympathetic to O'Connor. The cranky Corkman's references to "Charles Eichmann-Trevelyan" and "Murder Unlimited", and his assertion that "a majority of Englishmen hated the Irish as a majority of Germans hated the Jews" were embarrassing, and probably not what literary editor Terence de Vere White had expected. They may help explain why revisionist historians in the past tended to downplay the Famine - an event "not unique in the context of contemporary European experience" - or to write about something else. Third, and on a gentler note, an interesting chapter by Karen Hill McNamara traces the impact of Woodham-Smith's fallible but brilliant classic - itself once unkindly described by a UCD academic as "a great novel"- on children's literature. Hungry Words ends with a thoughtful overview of the field by Chris Morash.
Famine scholarship is an inherently interdisciplinary area. Economic historians learn from medical historians, historical demographers from anthropologists. Hungry Words suggests that, so far, literary studies have more to learn from historians and economists than the other way around.
Cormac Ó Gráda lectures in economics and economic history at UCD. His last book was Black '47 and Beyond (Princeton, 1999). Ireland's Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Essays (UCD Press) and Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton UP) are due this year
Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon Eds. George Cusack and Sarah Goss Irish Academic Press, 342pp. £19.50