Hunger

Hunger PDF

Author: James Vernon

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0674044673

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Rigorously researched, Hunger: A Modern History draws together social, cultural, and political history, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions committed to the conquest of world hunger.

Hunger on the Stage

Hunger on the Stage PDF

Author: Elisabeth Angel-Perez

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-10-02

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1443814962

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In his short story “The Hunger Artist,” Kafka imagined the theatrical career of a “professional faster” whose performance consists merely in displaying his own starving body before an avid audience. Kafka thus paradoxically suggested that hunger, mere emptiness working its way through declining bodies, may be a privileged theatrical object. Hunger often signals an anchorage in socio-historical reality, and invites extreme situations on stage, articulating large-scale cataclysms (famines, the devastation of war) with personal tragedies (hunger-strikes, anorexia, etc.) in which characters experience the tenuousness of their own lives. Whether in the comic or in the tragic mode, staged hunger metaphorizes various kinds of starvation – material greed, spiritual, emotional, sexual starvation, and even linguistic insufficiency. This volume explores the aesthetic and ethical issues raised by hunger on the stage in the English-speaking world. It investigates the paradox of the hypervisibility of the thinning body and shows how, throughout history, hunger has given shape to innovative, powerfully transgressive dramaturgies.

Ireland's Great Famine and Popular Politics

Ireland's Great Famine and Popular Politics PDF

Author: Enda Delaney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1134758057

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Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–52 was among the most devastating food crises in modern history. A country of some eight-and-a-half-million people lost one million to hunger and disease and another million to emigration. According to land activist Michael Davitt, the starving made little or no effort to assert "the animal’s right to existence," passively accepting their fate. But the poor did resist. In word and deed, they defied landlords, merchants and agents of the state: they rioted for food, opposed rent and rate collection, challenged the decisions of those controlling relief works, and scorned clergymen who attributed their suffering to the Almighty. The essays collected here examine the full range of resistance in the Great Famine, and illuminate how the crisis itself transformed popular politics. Contributors include distinguished scholars of modern Ireland and emerging historians and critics. This book is essential reading for students of modern Ireland, and the global history of collective action.

Light, Freedom and Song

Light, Freedom and Song PDF

Author: David Pierce

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780300109948

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In this absorbing analysis of modern Irish writing, an acknowledged expert considers the hybrid character of modern Irish writing to show how language, culture, and history have been affected by the colonial encounter between Ireland and Britain. Examining the great themes of loss and struggle, David Pierce traces the impact on Irish writing of the Great Famine and cultural nationalism and considers the way the work of Ireland’s two leading writers, W. B.Yeats and James Joyce, complicate and elucidate our view of "the harp and the crown.” The book draws a contrast between the West of Ireland in the 1930s, when the new Irish State enjoyed its first full independent decade, and the North of Ireland in the 1980s, when the spectre of British imperialism threatened the stability of Ireland. Pierce then surveys contemporary Irish writing and reflects on the legacy of the colonial encounter and on the passage to a postmodern or postnationalist Ireland in the work of such crucial living writers as John Banville, Derek Mahon, and John McGahern.

The Great Famine

The Great Famine PDF

Author: Ciarán Ó Murchadha

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-06-02

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 144113977X

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Over one million people died in the Great Famine, and more than one million more emigrated on the coffin ships to America and beyond. Drawing on contemporary eyewitness accounts and diaries, the book charts the arrival of the potato blight in 1845 and the total destruction of the harvests in 1846 which brought a sense of numbing shock to the populace. Far from meeting the relief needs of the poor, the Liberal public works programme was a first example of how relief policies would themselves lead to mortality. Workhouses were swamped with thousands who had subsisted on public works and soup kitchens earlier, and who now gathered in ragged crowds. Unable to cope, workhouse staff were forced to witness hundreds die where they lay, outside the walls. The next phase of degradation was the clearances, or exterminations in popular parlance which took place on a colossal scale. From late 1847 an exodus had begun. The Famine slowly came to an end from late 1849 but the longer term consequences were to reverberate through future decades.