Overview

What can the life writing of post-famine Irish immigrants tell us about Irish diasporic memory? Of Memory and the Misplaced considers the endurance and nature of Irish American memory across the twentieth century. Guided by 30 memoirs written between 1900 and 1970, Sarah O'Brien shows the prevalence of intimate and taboo themes in ordinary immigrants' writing, such as domestic violence, same-sex love, and famine-induced trauma. Importantly, Of Memory and the Misplaced critiques the role of the Irish landscape as a site of memory and shows how the interiority of the domestic world has provided Irish women with the language needed to reclaim their own lives. Combining literary and historical theory, Of Memory and the Misplaced highlights voices that have traditionally been silenced and offers a rare and unexplored collection of primary source autobiographical texts to better understand the experiences of Irish immigrants in the United States.

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9780253067883

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Reviews

"""Solidly rooted in recent theoretical frameworks from memory studies, Of Memory and the Displaced provides a valuable combination of academic analyses and lengthy extracts from hitherto unexplored Irish-American migrants' memoirs. This pioneering publication challenges the predominant notion of a Catholic transatlantic diaspora in significant ways, by integrating the memories of women as well as non-Catholic immigrants, and by stressing the regional and linguistic variations among them. The included memoirs show how watershed events in both Ireland and the United States--such as the Great Famine and the American Civil War--were remembered by intercultural communities well into the twentieth century.""--Marguérite Corporaal, Radboud University"

Author Information

Sarah O'Brien is Lecturer at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland, and codirector of the college's Oral History Centre. She is author of Linguistic Diasporas, Narrative and Performance: The Irish in Argentina.

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