Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine
Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Series:
Edited By Marguerite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack, Lindsay Janssen and Ruud van den Beuken
Book (EPUB)
- ISBN:
- 978-3-0353-9905-9
- Availability:
- Available
- Subjects:
Prices
Currency depends on your shipping address
- Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2014. 345 pp., num. fig. and tables
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author(s)/editor(s)
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen: Introduction
- Famine Memory: Politics and Literature
- Irish Studies and Famine Memory
- New Directions
- The Outline of this Volume
- Section I: Rewriting History
- Margaret Kelleher: The ‘Affective Gap’ and Recent Histories of Ireland’s Great Famine
- New Famine Histories and the ‘Fiction-Effect’
- Revisiting Earlier Historiography: ‘The Generation After’
- Famine and its Affective Economies: Why Gender Matters
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Peter Gray: The Great Famine in Irish and British Historiographies, c. 1860–1914
- Mitchel’s ‘History’
- O’Rourke and Catholic Famine History
- Irish Liberal Interpretations
- Froude, Goldwin Smith and the British View
- Conclusion
- Andrew G. Newby: ‘Rather Peculiar Claims Upon Our Sympathies’: Britain and Famine in Finland, 1856–1868
- Damage Limitation: Britain and Finland in the late 1850s
- Humiliating the Tsar: The 1862 Crisis
- Stretching Forth the Hand of Help: British Relief Efforts in 1868
- Conclusion
- Peter Slomanson: Cataclysm as a Catalyst for Language Shift
- Societal Reorganization in the Wake of Disaster
- Self-Imposed Linguistic Repression as a Collective Response to Cataclysm
- Correlating Language Shift with Other Changes: The Need for New Interdisciplinary Research
- Conclusion
- Section II: Rereading the Classics
- Gordon Bigelow: Anthony Trollope’s Famine Economics
- Capitalism without History
- Hamlet without the Prince
- Chris Morash: ‘Where All Ladders Start’: Famine Memories in Yeats’s Countess Cathleen
- Yeats and Minor Literature
- The Famine and the Countess
- ‘Where All Ladders Start’
- Section III: Commemorating the Dead
- Jonny Geber: Reconstructing Realities: Exploring the Human Experience of the Great Famine through Archaeology
- Famine Archaeologies at the Kilkenny Union Workhouse
- The Bioarchaeology of the Poor and Destitute
- The Human Experience of the Great Irish Famine – A Painful Endurance of Scurvy
- Telling Their Story
- Conclusion
- Melissa Fegan: Waking the Bones: The Return of the Famine Dead in Contemporary Irish Literature
- Sending Them off Mean: Famine Funerals in Irish Literature
- Haunted Cabins and Ghost Estates in Contemporary Famine Novels
- Spectres of Famine
- Section IV: Spacing the Famine
- Declan Curran: Geographic Scale and the Great Famine
- Geographic Scales
- The Mahon Murder in Context
- Repercussions of the Mahon Murder across Scales
- Conclusion
- Paul S. Ell, Niall Cunningham and Ian N. Gregory: No Spatial Watershed: Religious Geographies of Ireland Pre- and Post-Famine
- Ireland’s Religious Geographies in 1834
- The Famine Period: Religious Change 1834 to 1861
- Longer-Term Religious Change after the Famine
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Section V: Atlantic Connections
- David Sim:Philanthropy, Diplomacy and Nationalism: The United States and the Great Famine
- Jason King: The Remembrance of Irish Famine Migrants in the Fever Sheds of Montreal
- Coffin Ships and Fever Sheds
- Textual and Visual Mediations of Famine Memory
- Anxiety of Proselytization
- Fever and Festivity
- Famine Memory and the Elision of Ethno-Religious Conflict
- Conclusion
- Mark G. Mcgowan: Contemporary Links between Canadian and Irish Famine Commemoration
- The Historical Context of the Famine in British North America
- Commemoration of the Famine
- Ireland Park
- Conclusion
- David Lloyd: Afterword: The Afterlife of the Untimely Dead
- Bibliography
- Journals and Newspapers
- Archives and Manuscript Collections
- General Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Series Index
Jonny Geber: Reconstructing Realities: Exploring the Human Experience of the Great Famine through Archaeology
Chapter
- Subjects:
Prices
Chapter Price (Chapters only digitally available)
Currency depends on your shipping address
Extract
| 139 →
JONNY GEBER
Reconstructing Realities: Exploring the Human Experience of the Great Famine through Archaeology
The veracity of the horrors of the Great Irish Famine became evident in 2006. That year, an archaeological excavation within the premises of the former union workhouse in Kilkenny City exposed an intramural mass burial ground containing a minimum of 970 individuals. The excavated area was located within the north-eastern corner of the workhouse grounds and comprised sixty-three large pits in which the dead had been placed in coffins that were stacked on top of each other.1 These burials took place between August 1847 and March 1851, some of the worst years of the Famine, during which there was severe overcrowding and, consequently, mass death in the Kilkenny workhouse. The decision to resort to intramural burials was controversial but inevitable. Prior to this, the city cemeteries of St Patrick and St Maul had been used, but these eventually became so critically full that they started to pose a significant health risk to the city’s wider population. The Board of Guardians actively sought a suitable plot of land for an official workhouse cemetery, and when they succeeded, intramural burials were immediately discontinued.2 The mass burial ground was eventually covered over and the plot put to another use. By the time of its excavation ← 139 | 140 → 160 years later, all local knowledge of its existence had been lost and the discovery was therefore completely unanticipated.
The excavation of the...
You are not authenticated to view the full text of this chapter or article.
This site requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books or journals.
Do you have any questions? Contact us.
Or login to access all content.- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author(s)/editor(s)
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen: Introduction
- Famine Memory: Politics and Literature
- Irish Studies and Famine Memory
- New Directions
- The Outline of this Volume
- Section I: Rewriting History
- Margaret Kelleher: The ‘Affective Gap’ and Recent Histories of Ireland’s Great Famine
- New Famine Histories and the ‘Fiction-Effect’
- Revisiting Earlier Historiography: ‘The Generation After’
- Famine and its Affective Economies: Why Gender Matters
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Peter Gray: The Great Famine in Irish and British Historiographies, c. 1860–1914
- Mitchel’s ‘History’
- O’Rourke and Catholic Famine History
- Irish Liberal Interpretations
- Froude, Goldwin Smith and the British View
- Conclusion
- Andrew G. Newby: ‘Rather Peculiar Claims Upon Our Sympathies’: Britain and Famine in Finland, 1856–1868
- Damage Limitation: Britain and Finland in the late 1850s
- Humiliating the Tsar: The 1862 Crisis
- Stretching Forth the Hand of Help: British Relief Efforts in 1868
- Conclusion
- Peter Slomanson: Cataclysm as a Catalyst for Language Shift
- Societal Reorganization in the Wake of Disaster
- Self-Imposed Linguistic Repression as a Collective Response to Cataclysm
- Correlating Language Shift with Other Changes: The Need for New Interdisciplinary Research
- Conclusion
- Section II: Rereading the Classics
- Gordon Bigelow: Anthony Trollope’s Famine Economics
- Capitalism without History
- Hamlet without the Prince
- Chris Morash: ‘Where All Ladders Start’: Famine Memories in Yeats’s Countess Cathleen
- Yeats and Minor Literature
- The Famine and the Countess
- ‘Where All Ladders Start’
- Section III: Commemorating the Dead
- Jonny Geber: Reconstructing Realities: Exploring the Human Experience of the Great Famine through Archaeology
- Famine Archaeologies at the Kilkenny Union Workhouse
- The Bioarchaeology of the Poor and Destitute
- The Human Experience of the Great Irish Famine – A Painful Endurance of Scurvy
- Telling Their Story
- Conclusion
- Melissa Fegan: Waking the Bones: The Return of the Famine Dead in Contemporary Irish Literature
- Sending Them off Mean: Famine Funerals in Irish Literature
- Haunted Cabins and Ghost Estates in Contemporary Famine Novels
- Spectres of Famine
- Section IV: Spacing the Famine
- Declan Curran: Geographic Scale and the Great Famine
- Geographic Scales
- The Mahon Murder in Context
- Repercussions of the Mahon Murder across Scales
- Conclusion
- Paul S. Ell, Niall Cunningham and Ian N. Gregory: No Spatial Watershed: Religious Geographies of Ireland Pre- and Post-Famine
- Ireland’s Religious Geographies in 1834
- The Famine Period: Religious Change 1834 to 1861
- Longer-Term Religious Change after the Famine
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Section V: Atlantic Connections
- David Sim:Philanthropy, Diplomacy and Nationalism: The United States and the Great Famine
- Jason King: The Remembrance of Irish Famine Migrants in the Fever Sheds of Montreal
- Coffin Ships and Fever Sheds
- Textual and Visual Mediations of Famine Memory
- Anxiety of Proselytization
- Fever and Festivity
- Famine Memory and the Elision of Ethno-Religious Conflict
- Conclusion
- Mark G. Mcgowan: Contemporary Links between Canadian and Irish Famine Commemoration
- The Historical Context of the Famine in British North America
- Commemoration of the Famine
- Ireland Park
- Conclusion
- David Lloyd: Afterword: The Afterlife of the Untimely Dead
- Bibliography
- Journals and Newspapers
- Archives and Manuscript Collections
- General Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Series Index