Description:
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 Quotes: "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)