Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment connects Ireland's Magdalen laundries and the nation-state's nativist politics in the post-independence era, while critically evaluating cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, recovered these institutions from the amnesia at the center of state politics. The first half of the book explores the relationship between the Magdalen laundries and the nation's architecture of containment, which rendered invisible segments of the population (e.g., illegitimate children, single...