This book examines the relationships between memory, history, and
national identity through an interdisciplinary analysis of James Joyce's
works-as well as of literary texts by Kundera, Ford, Fitzgerald, and
Walker Percy. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Luria,
Anderson, and Yerushalmi, this study explores the burden of the past and
the "nightmare of history" in Ireland and in the American South-from the
Battle of the Boyne to the Good Friday Agreement, from the Civil War to
the 2015 Mother Emanuel killings.