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Victorian Studies 48.1 (2005) 166-167



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Literature and the Irish Famine 1845–1919, by Melissa Fegan; pp. 281. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2002, £45.00, $99.00.
It used to be the case that the Irish Famine of the 1840s was the great unspoken event of the Victorian era, the unnameable atrocity, the moment at which the wheels of representation ground to a halt, unable to accommodate suffering on such a scale. Over the past decade or so, however, spurred in part by anniversary commemorations in 1995, this has ceased to be true, at least in any literal sense. Since the early 1990s, the shelf of Irish Famine literature has grown steadily, not only through new titles appearing regularly (and there are more in the offing), but with scholars rediscovering older, overlooked texts of all sorts—from novels and poems to personal testimonials and official reports. It may still be true, as Terry Eagleton once observed, that the Irish Famine never produced its Joyce, a writer whose work was adequate to the scale of the event; but, at the same time, no one could now claim, as once was the case, that there is a silence about the Irish Famine.

There is a sense, therefore, that the central premise of Melissa Fegan's Literature and the Irish Famine 1845–1919 is already proven by the existence of the very critical discourse of which the book is a part. In her introduction, Fegan claims that she is setting out "to prove that the Famine had an impact on literature in Ireland and elsewhere," and that Famine literature "is not 'insignificant' in quantity and certainly not in interest" (9). But this point has already been well established, as her own thorough survey of the existing secondary literature makes clear. If anything, she convinces the reader that Irish Famine studies should move beyond this kind of basic groundbreaking exercise, as we find in a more recent work such as Stuart McLean's superb The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (2004). It seems almost as if Fegan wishes the old silence was still there to be broken.

While there is much of interest here, and Fegan covers Irish Famine literature with considerable thoroughness, her basic premise makes it difficult for her to engage constructively with other Famine criticism. In some cases, her readings of other recent studies of Famine literature are quite simply misleading. For instance, she quotes Margaret Kelleher (from her PhD thesis) to the effect that the focus on female victims in so many accounts confines the Famine to the domestic sphere, allowing "authors to evade discussion of famine as a political phenomenon." Fegan comments: "What Kelleher fails to explain is why Famine authors should want to avoid the political sphere. On the contrary they often court it." In the same paragraph, Fegan suggests that "far from being apolitical, the female victim may be interpreted as an icon for an Ireland which can no longer feed her 'children'" (211–12). At no point does Kelleher ever claim that all Famine authors want to avoid political debate; nor does she suggest that gendered representations are not themselves political. On the contrary, Kelleher has argued precisely this point over the years, and her book The Feminization of Famine (Cork, 1997) (which Fegan chooses to ignore in this context) ends by concluding that "the politics of famine may be covered over, or exposed, by the image chosen" (230).

This misrepresentation of existing scholarship recurs throughout Literature and the Irish Famine. I picked up another, even more glaring example, simply because it referred to my own work. Fegan quotes an article I published in 1995, "Spectres of the Famine," where I argued that the repeated images of spectres and living skeletons, even in ostensibly factual accounts of the Famine, constitute "a haunting of language," in which [End Page 166] we can see "a discourse of the Famine taking shape, with its own particular vocabulary" (75–76). Fegan retorts that such images are not, "as Morash suggests, part of a developing vocabulary of...

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