From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860-75.
The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845-50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.
Corporaal
Marguérite
M
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
D000383:Agriculture / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D054242:Emigrants and Immigrants / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000523:psychology; D004641:Emigration and Immigration / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000193:education / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000523:psychology; D005523:Food Supply / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D007494:Ireland / Q000208:ethnology; D008091:Literature / Q000266:history; D008568:Memory; D033262:Narration / Q000266:history; D011057:Politics; D012423:Rural Health / Q000266:history; D012424:Rural Population / Q000266:history; D012933:Social Identification; D013217:Starvation / Q000191:economics / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology