The Event and Its Terrors

Download or read book The Event and Its Terrors written by Stuart John McLean and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Event and its Terrors undertakes a critical reimagining of one of the major events of Irish history—the Great Famine of the 1840s—and of its subsequent legacies. Drawing on a wide range of sources, past and present, it considers the emergence of the Famine as an object of historical knowledge and controversy with reference both to the experience of modernity and to the production of academic and nationalist histories in colonial and post-independence Ireland. In doing so, it explores the possibility of alternative modes of engagement with the past via contemporary eyewitness accounts, oral histories, literature, folklore, and present-day commemorative events.