Kirjahaku

Despite the ease with which scholars have used the term ""memory"" in re­cent decades, its definition remains enigmatic. Does cultural memory rely on the memories of individuals, or does it take shape beyond the borders of the individual mind? Cultural memory has garnered particular atten­tion within Irish studies. With its trauma-filled history and sizable global diaspora, Ireland presents an ideal subject for work in this vein. What do stereotypes of Irish memory—as extensive, unforgiving, begrudging, but also blank on particular, usually traumatic, subjects—reveal about the ways in which cultural remembrance works in contemporary Irish culture and in Irish diasporic culture? How do icons of Irishness—from the harp to the cottage, from the Celtic cross to a figure like James Joyce—function in cultural memory? This collection seeks to address these questions as it maps a landscape of cultural memory in Ireland through theoretical, historical, literary, and cultural explorations by top scholars in the field of Irish studies. In a series that will ultimately include four volumes, the sixteen es­says in this first volume explore remembrance and forgetting throughout history, from early modern Ireland to contemporary multicultural Ireland. Among the many subjects address, Guy Beiner disentangles ""collective"" from ""folk"" memory in ""Remembering and Forgetting the Irish Rebellion of 1798,"" and Anne Dolan looks at local memory of the Civil war in ""Embodying the Memory of War and Civil War."" The volume concludes with Alan Titley’s ""The Great Forgetting,"" a compelling argu­ment for viewing modern Irish culture as an artifact of the Europeaniza­tion of Ireland and for bringing into focus the urgent need for further, wide-ranging Irish-language scholarship.

In the second volume of a series that will ultimately include four, the authors consider Irish diasporic memory and memory practices. While the Irish diaspora has become the subject of a wide range of scholarship, there has been little work focused on its relationship to memory. The first half of the volume asks how diasporic memory functions in different places and times, and what forms it takes on. As an island nation with a history of emigration, Ireland has developed a rich diasporic cultural memory, one that draws on multiple traditions and historiographies of both “home” and “away.” Native traditions are not imported wholesale, but instead develop their own curious hybridity, reflecting the nature of emigrant memory that absorbs new ways of thinking about home. How do immigrants remember their homeland? How do descendants of immigrants “remember” a land they rarely visit? How does diasporic memory pass through families, and how is it represented in cultural forms such as literature, festivals, and souvenirs? In its second half, this volume shifts its attention to the concept of “memory practices,” ways of cultural remembering that result from and are shaped by particular cultural forms. Many of these cultural forms embody memory materially through language, music, and photography and, because of their distinctive expressions of culture, give rise to distinctive memory practices. Gathering the leading voices in Irish studies, this volume opens new pathways into the body of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating time and again the ways in which memory is supported by the negotiations of individuals within wider cultural contexts.

How do we live when our loved ones are dying? How do we make sense of the world in their wake? And how do we balance love in the present with memory of the past? As she witnesses her mother’s descent into dementia and a beloved friend’s cruel battle with cancer, Oona Frawley reconsiders the death of her father in New York decades earlier, the loss of her parents' home in Ireland before she was born, and the births of her own children. Balancing between grief at the passing of those closest to her, and joy at the emergence of new life, Frawley has wrought a stunning meditation on memory, family and the brief windows of life we share with those we love. Utterly humane, fearlessly honest and always, at its core, hopeful, This Interim Time is a powerful, moving work at once intensely personal and entirely universal.