MACMILLAN 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. Review “It provides novel approaches to the study of the relationship between body, pain and historical memory. … It is undisputable that this book provides a valuable and interdisciplinary variety of theoretical and methodological approaches that fill a gap in bibliography about Irish cultural history.” (Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez, Review of Irish Studies in Europe – RISE, Vol. 2 (1-2), March, 2018) “Each essay offers significant insight into representations of pain in a specific historical context … . Scholars and students of any period of Irish history, culture, and literature will certainly find fodder for further exploration here as will those concerned with violence and its legacy in other regions.” (Valerie McGowan-Doyle, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 71 (1), 2018) Review “This important, often passionate book brings the perspectives of recent work in trauma studies to bear on our understanding of Irish lives.  Its focus: the tormented, repressed, caricatured, controlled and rebellious Irish body, and how to read it now. Ranging across five centuries of Irish history, literature and culture, the book announces a new and important phase of feminist engagement with Irishness. Here are a set of fresh and brilliant new perspectives on ‘the matter of Ireland,’ as it has actually been experienced on the ground, by Irish people and Irish bodies, especially those of women. In this collection, alive with the ‘savage indignation’ Swift once demanded of Irish criticism, the sufferers, long marginalized and silenced by various discourses of power, are at last given the chance to speak.” (Enda Duffy, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) From the Back Cover 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. About the Author Fionnuala Dillane is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is author of Before George Eliot: Marian Evans in the Periodical Press, joint winner of the 2014 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize. Naomi McAreavey is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published widely on the 1641 rebellion, and her edition of The Letters of the First Duchess of Ormonde is forthcoming. Emilie Pine is Lecturer in Modern Drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of The Politics of Irish Memory (Palgrav