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Emerging Imagery: The Great Famine In Nineteenth Century Irish Lit, Barbara A. Pitrone

ETD Archive

The critical debate surrounding the Great Famine in Irish Literature centers on the notion of a perceived silence. While some scholars claim that there is a literary void in Irish Literature following this cataclysmic event, others wonder whether language is even capable of describing the extreme physical, emotional, and psychological suffering that is inflicted upon the victims when such tragedies occur. Centuries of imperialism and colonialism had created a class divide so wide and an Irish economy so fragile that when a calamity such as famine occurred, it was the poverty-stricken, predominately Irish-Catholic peasantry that suffered most. Poor and illiterate, …