Convulsion Recalled: Aftermath and Cultural Memory (Post-1798 Ireland)

Abstract

It is no coincidence that the field of memory studies or ‘mnemohistory’ has been deeply influenced by scholars with a background in literary rather than social-political history — from Aleida and Jan Assmann, by way of Ansgar Nünning and Astrid Erll, to Ann Rigney and Michael Rothberg. Of all the historical sciences, literary history is perhaps the specialism that is most consciously aware of the duality of history, its oscillation between event and experience, between occurrence and recall. As the great Prague structuralist Felix Vodičká ([1943] 1976) argued, the historicity of a text works along multiple chronologies. It depends, not only on the dynamics of cultural production — placing Laurence Sterne into the pre-Romantic run-up to Hölderlin and Keats — but also in the ongoing accretion of successive readings and interpre-tations. Each of these readings and interpretations harks back to the original text, but each also falls under the shadow of all previous readings and interpretations, overlays covering the original text. This double historicity — the succession of texts along the time-axis of their authors’ productivity, and the accumulation of meanings along the time-axis of their readers’ reception — complicates the chronology. Keats, long after his death, became one of the great poets of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and of the fin de siècle, following which he was succeeded by Hölderlin (the mystic-existentialist inspiration of the George Circle and of Martin Heidegger), both finally overtaken by Tristram Shandy (that foundational text for late twentieth-century postmodernism).