The Naming of Identity: The Famine Narrative in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea and the Transatlantic Diasporic Writing

Abstract

Abstract: The Great Famine(1845—1849), which Terry Eagleton referred to as the “Irish Auschwitz”, is the most devastating catastrophe in the Irish history that has inflicted a haunting psychological trauma upon the Irish generation after generation. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002) not only unfetters the traditional nationalism/revisionism division and deconstructs the homogeneous versions of Irish history, but also breaks the silence around the Famine. Through a blend of cross-genre writings, such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, O’Connor depicts the horrifying scenes of starvation and death aboard the “coffin ship” and defines the ultimate devastation of the Famine that swept through the whole island in his transatlantic diasporic writing: the scattering of victims’ corpses is both a destruction of human bodies and a black hole of identity, naming and meaning. The Famine narrative of the novel touches upon the relationship between Irish nativeness and cosmopolitanism during the Victorian period and reflects the contemporary Irish writer’s poetic thinking about the formation of the Irish national identity.

Key words: Star of the Sea, diasporic writing, famine narrative, Irishness

Wang Luchen. The Naming of Identity: The Famine Narrative in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea and the Transatlantic Diasporic Writing[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2019, 41(5): 123-134.

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