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MARGUÉRITE CORPORAAL, CHRISTOPHER CUSACK AND LINDSAY JANSSEN

11 From Restoration to Reinscription: The Great Famine in Irish North-American Fiction, 1847–1921

‘The Emigrant Ship’, an anonymous sketch that was republished in The Literary Garland in November 1850 and that had originally been written for a Protestant orphan bazaar raising funds to aid Irish children who had lost their parents on the transatlantic passage, emphasizes the severe despondency of the emigrants on deck who utter ‘a wailing cry […] so sad and plaintive’ when they ‘take a last look of their native land’.1 Describing the fate of those Irish children who sought to escape imminent starvation and destitution during Ireland’s Great Famine, the story, as a vehicle of transcultural memory, also bears witness to the transportability of recollection from one community to another, and raises questions like: how do recollections change when they are transported to other geographical and cultural spaces – for example through migration? Can we speak of a specific diasporic development of the cultural memories that are connected to the former homeland? Andreas Huyssen has argued in favour of a more thorough examination of ‘the relationship between diasporic memory and the memory formations of the national culture within which a given diaspora may be embedded’.2 More recently, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad have similary proposed a transnational approach towards investigating ← 233 | 234 → the dynamics of memory, as ‘migrants carry their heritage, memories and traumas with them’ which ‘are transferred and brought into...