The memory of catastrophe [Paperback]

Investigates the dynamic relationship between experiences of profound social and cultural disruption, and human memory. Critical comparisons are made across a wide variety of catastrophic experiences and memories; not just of war, but also of massacre, genocide, rebellion, famine, partition, shipwreck and fire. The book is an accessible showcase for a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of memory, including literary studies, cultural studies, participant-observation and historical studies, and uses a variety of oral, visual and written sources. Offers a diverse chronological and geographical range of catastrophic cases, from seventeenth-century England to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, from Ireland to the Indian sub-continent, from Mexico to wartime Leningrad. Well-written and accessible - a fascinating read.

List of Contributors

1. Introduction - Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver

2. Remembering the English Civil War - Mark Stoyle

3. 'Diabolical design': Charleston elites, the 1822 slave insurrection and the discourse of the supernatural - P. A. Cramer

4. Memory and the commemoration of the Great Irish Famine - Peter Gray

5. 'The greatest and the worst': Dominant and subaltern memories of the Dos Bocas well fire of 1908 - Glen D. Kuecker

6. The Titanic and the commodification of catastrophe - James Guimond

7. Doctors and trauma in World War One: The response of British military psychiatrists - Edgar Jones

8. Commemorations of the siege of Leningrad: A catastrophe in memory and myth - Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

9. The missing camps of Aktion Reinhard: The judicial displacement of a mass murder - Donald Bloxham

10. Memory and authenticity: The case of Binjamin Wilkomirski - Andrea Reiter

11. Partition memory and multiple identities in the Champaran district of Bihar, India - Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff

12. Bodies do count: American nurses mourn the catastrophl³"