This book illuminates how the 'long eighteenth century' (1660-1800) persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing and visual art. Tracing the afterlives of the period from the 1980s to the present, it argues that these emerging and changing forms stage the period as a point of origin for the grounding of individual identity in personal memory, and as a site of foundational traumas that shape cultural memory.

Unique perspective: links the work of the eighteenth century to memory studies Exciting approach: considers not just the eighteenth century and its texts, but the way the period is reworked and re-imagined today Wide-ranging: covers art, literature, history, modern art, fiction and films

Autorentext

James Ward is a Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK.

Klappentext

This book illuminates how the long eighteenth century (1660-1800) persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing and visual art. Tracing the afterlives of the period from the 1980s to the present, it argues that these emerging and changing forms stage the period as a point of origin for the grounding of individual identity in personal memory, and as a site of foundational traumas that shape cultural memory.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements.- 1.Introduction Theatres of Memory.- 2.Restorations.- 3.'Ever-haunting Hogarth': Remembering the Hogarthian Progress.- 4.Emma Donoghue's Enlightenment Fictions.- 5.Memory and Enlightenment in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian.- 6. The Recruiting Officer in the Penal Colony.- 7.Memory and Atrocity: Representing the Zong .-8.Conclusion.- Bibliography.