아일랜드 현대 문학에 나타난 대 기근: 제임스 클라렌스 망간(James Clarence Mangan)으로부터 셰무스 히니(Seamus Heaney)까지

Abstract

There is nothing comparable to the Great Famine of the 19th century in terms of its impact on the formation of the modern Irish community. The Great Famine caused an unprecedented, miserable starvation and the overseas emigration leading to the radical decrease of its population by half. The trace of the miserable life is vividly to be seen among the folk memories and their literary works, whose content is as followings: Ireland cannot be a permanently tragical country and the Irish landlord and the British Empire have to be blamed for it. And lastly, unlike these criticism against the British Empire, the Great Famine is partly due to their fatalism. Many literary people including such as James Clarence Mangan, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney relay the dark misery of the Great Famine from the different perspective: Mangan vividly reports the darkness; Yeats beautifies the peasantry’s material poverty by transforming it into the spiritual abundancy whereas James Joyce, P.Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney represent the wound in a realistic way. To our interest, J. Joyce attacks the avarice of the British people; Kavanagh attacks their own fatalism while Seamus Heaney tries to reveal the ambition and hypocrisy of the British Empire by depicting their own ancestor in a compassionate tone. My last conclusion, hopefully supported by the investigation above, is this: when dealing with and depicting the Disaster, the Irish writers cannot but be affected by their ethnicity, religion and place of growth as well as the characteristics of the time they lived.