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Forgetful Remembrance offers a new approach to the study of memory by focusing on vernacular historiographies and the notion of forgetting. Using the 1798 Irish Rebellion, Beiner explores how communities try to obscure inconvenient and uncomfortable events from the past.
List of contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Abbreviations
- Epigraphs
- Preface: Forgetful Remembrance
- Introduction: Sites of Oblivion
- Vernacular Historiography
- Social Forgetting
- The Turn-Out
- Part I: Pre-Forgetting: Before 1798
- 1: Recycling Memory
- 2: Initiating Counter-Memory
- 3: Silencing
- 4: Anticipating Forgetting
- Part II: Amnesty and Amnesia: The Aftermath of 1798
- 5: Wilful Forgetting
- 6: Unforgivingness
- 7: Exiling Memory
- 8: Impenitence
- 9: The Chimera of Oblivion
- Part III: The Generation of Forgetting: The First Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 10: Uninscribed Epitaphs
- 11: Wilful Muteness
- 12: Versified Recall
- 13: Fictionalized Memory
- 14: Hesitations in Coming Out
- 15: Collecting Recollections
- 16: Postmemory Anxieties
- Part IV: Regenerated Forgetting: The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 17: Continued Disremembrance
- 18: Excavating Memory
- 19: Countering Neglect
- 20: Imagined Reminiscence
- 21: Cultural Memory and Social Forgetting
- 22: Revivalism and Re-Collecting
- Part V: Decommemorating: The Turn of the Century
- 23: Infighting
- 24: Iconoclasm
- 25: Rowdyism
- 26: Recasting and Performing
- 27: Rewriting and Staging
- 28: Historical Disregard
- 29: Re-Commemorating
- Part VI: Restored Forgetting: The Short Twentieth Century
- 30: Partitioned Memory
- 31: Breaking Silence
- 32: Unperceived Remembrance
- 33: Troubled Forgetting
- 34: Nonconformism
- Part VII: Post-Forgetting: Into the Twenty-First Century
- 35: Remembrance and Reconciliation
- 36: Exhibiting Memory
- 37: Countering Disremembering
- 38: Disparities of Esteem
- Part VIII: Conclusion: Rites of Oblivion
- 39: Dealing with the Past
- 40: Social Forgetting Beyond Ulster
- 41: Rights of Forgetting
- Select Bibliography
About the author
Guy Beiner is a professor of modern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He specializes in the study of remembering and forgetting, with a particular interest in the history of Ireland. He was a Government of Ireland scholar at University College Dublin, a Government of Ireland Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, a Government of Hungary scholar at the Central European University, and a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the multi-prize-winning book, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory.
Summary
Forgetful Remembrance offers a new approach to the study of memory by focusing on vernacular historiographies and the notion of forgetting. Using the 1798 Irish Rebellion, Beiner explores how communities try to obscure inconvenient and uncomfortable events from the past.
Additional text
This book is 'bottom-up' history at its best, a sustained and subtle reflection on the enduring shadow of the failed rising of 1798 in Northern Ireland. Using a vast array of sources, Beiner shows shrewdly how for over two centuries ordinary people in Ulster and elsewhere have told this tale of a rising and its suppression through whispers, words, deeds and silence.
