The impact of the Irish famine of 1845-1852 was unparalleled in both political and psychological terms. The effects of famine-related mortality and emigration were devastating, in the field of literature no less than in other areas. In this incisive new study, Melissa Fegan explores the famine's legacy to literature, tracing it in the work of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919. Dr. Fegan examines both fiction and non-fiction, including journalism, travel-narratives and the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope. She argues that an examination of famine literature that simply...

Readers and critics have been intrigued - and disturbed - by the characters of Wuthering Heights since its publication in 1847. Heathcliff and Catherine, the tormented and enigmatic lovers at the centre of the novel, have justifiably been the focus of critical attention. Yet the novel is peopled with a large cast of idiosyncratic characters, each of whom plays a significant role in the plot. This novel, with its references to physiognomy and monomania, its interest in dreams as revelations of the unconscious mind, and its recognition of the importance of origins in...