This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been
registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than
four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular
approach to what pain means: the material addressed in this collection
covers diverse cultural forms, from reports of battles and executions to
stage and screen representations of sexual violence, produced in
response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our
understanding of how pain - whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or
remediated - is culturally coded.
Pain is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in
all of the essays gathered here. This collection offers new paradigms
for understanding Ireland's literary and cultural history.