The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture

"This important, often passionate book brings the perspectives of recent work in trauma studies to bear on our understanding of Irish lives. Its focus: the tormented, repressed, caricatured, controlled and rebellious Irish body, and how to read it now. Ranging across five centuries of Irish history, literature and culture, the book announces a new and important phase of feminist engagement with Irishness. Here are a set of fresh and brilliant new perspectives on 'the matter of Ireland,' as it has actually been experienced on the ground, by Irish people and Irish bodies, especially those of women. In this collection, alive with the 'savage indignation' Swift once demanded of Irish criticism, the sufferers, long marginalized and silenced by various discourses of power, are at last given the chance to speak." (Enda Duffy, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

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.