ABSTRACT
Starvation, gluttony, feasting, commensality, hospitality, existential anxieties, religion, gender, and class are common themes within the history of food and literature, and indeed food also functions as a complex signifier of national, racial, and cultural identity. Despite growing international scholarship of food in literature (Bevan 1988; Schofield 1989; Ellmann 1993; Applebaum 2006; Keeling and Pollard 2008; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Gilbert and Porter 2015; Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017), however, until recently, Ireland appeared “as only the smallest of dots on the map of high gastronomy” (Goldstein 2014, xi). Most international collections discuss the canonical Irish writings of James Joyce and of Jonathan Swift, and more recent collections include Seamus Heaney’s poetry (Gilbert and Porter 2015). O’Kane Mara (2009, 94) suggests starvation, both willing and unwilling, is a recurring theme in Irish history, citing Ellman’s (1993, 12) discussion of the medieval Irish legal procedure of “fasting to distrain”, where a creditor or victim of injustice could fast against a debtor or the person who had injured him. This tradition of self-imposed starvation or hunger strike – famously resulting in the death of Irish playwright, author, and politician Terence McSwiney in 1920, and reportedly influencing Mahatma Gandhi in India – was used again by prisoners in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Unwilling starvation due to famine has been recurrent in Ireland as in many other countries over the centuries, and is referenced in literature from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) to Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2003) (Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017, 106, 140). However, this connection of Ireland with famine has, to date, presented an obstacle to the exploration of Irish food and foodways (Goldstein 2014, xii).
