Feasting on Memory in Fasting Times: Retrieving Personal Identity from Collective Remembrance and Vice Versa in Nuala O'Faolain's "My Dream of You".

Abstract

Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You portrays the story of a middle-aged Irish woman, Katheleen de Burca, who initiates a both physical and personal journey back home to the rureland Ireland of her childhood. After leaving behind a past of rejection and voluntary exile in London, Katheleen not only rediscovers her own past but also her own identity as an Irish woman through her research into the adulterous relation between an English woman and her Irish servant during the Irish Great Famine at the end of the nineteenth-century. This article analuses the constant blending and permanent evolution of concepts such as memory, national remembrance and personal (his)story