“Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots
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Marlena Tronicke
Abstract
In Paul Lynch’s neo-Victorian Famine novel Grace (2017), the protagonist’s encounter with the proverbial root of all evil marks a moment of Gothic horror. Much more threatening than a single dead body, the foul-smelling, rotten potato invokes the gigantic number of corpses the blight produced during the Irish Famine of the 1840 s. Rather than a natural disaster, this must be understood as a direct result of what is often broadly referred to as ‘ecological imperialism’. This article examines the ways in which Grace positions the Famine as both concrete reality and synecdoche of colonialism. The novel traces how the potato blight, caused by the pathogen oomycete Phytophthora infestans, transforms rural Ireland into an uninhabitable wasteland, populated by dehumanised creatures that are rendered disposable. In a second step, I consider the rotten potato as metaphorical of neo-Victorianism’s larger critical potential. As critics have argued, neo-Victorianism is well-suited to intervene in selective and largely nostalgic memorialisations of Britain’s imperial legacies. To do so, however, it must properly acknowledge that the soil on which it plants – the textualities, theoretical frameworks, and methodological tools upon which it draws – is saturated with imperialist ideology to an extent that precludes any critical re-readings of the past and its bearing on the present.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments
- “In the Midst of Smoke and Flame”: Extraction Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
- Florence Marryat’s Sensational Ecologies of Empire, 1865–1897: Imaginary Tropics, White Proto-Feminism, and a Comforting Plantationocene
- “She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady
- “Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots
- “Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets
- Blurring Reality and Blurring Gender: Fashion and Attire in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- The Narrative Ordeal of Enduring Love: A Divine Comedy Recast
- Treading the Spiral: Intermediality, Spatiality, and Materiality in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
- The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”
- Reviews
- Claire Hansen. 2017. Shakespeare and Complexity Theory. New York: Routledge, xi + 222 pp., 10 illustr., 1 table, £35.99.
- Mathias Mayer. 2022. King Lear – Die Tragödie des Zuschauers: Ästhetik und Ethik der Empathie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 184 pp., €20.00.
- Eva Ries. 2022. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction. Anglia Book Series 76. Berlin: De Gruyter, 298 pp., €114.95.
- Helmut Pfeiffer. 2021. Das zerbrechliche Band der Gesellschaft: Diagnosen der Moderne zwischen Honoré de Balzac und Henry James. Paderborn: Brill, xxix + 375 pp., €79.00.
- Sämi Ludwig. 2020. Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, xiii + 270 pp., 20 illustr., $79.95.
- Mahshid Mayar. 2022. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, xiii + 239 pp., $32.95.
- Marie-Laure Ryan. 2022. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, x + 226 pp., 6 illustr., 3 tables, $89.95.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments
- “In the Midst of Smoke and Flame”: Extraction Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
- Florence Marryat’s Sensational Ecologies of Empire, 1865–1897: Imaginary Tropics, White Proto-Feminism, and a Comforting Plantationocene
- “She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady
- “Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots
- “Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets
- Blurring Reality and Blurring Gender: Fashion and Attire in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- The Narrative Ordeal of Enduring Love: A Divine Comedy Recast
- Treading the Spiral: Intermediality, Spatiality, and Materiality in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
- The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”
- Reviews
- Claire Hansen. 2017. Shakespeare and Complexity Theory. New York: Routledge, xi + 222 pp., 10 illustr., 1 table, £35.99.
- Mathias Mayer. 2022. King Lear – Die Tragödie des Zuschauers: Ästhetik und Ethik der Empathie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 184 pp., €20.00.
- Eva Ries. 2022. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction. Anglia Book Series 76. Berlin: De Gruyter, 298 pp., €114.95.
- Helmut Pfeiffer. 2021. Das zerbrechliche Band der Gesellschaft: Diagnosen der Moderne zwischen Honoré de Balzac und Henry James. Paderborn: Brill, xxix + 375 pp., €79.00.
- Sämi Ludwig. 2020. Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, xiii + 270 pp., 20 illustr., $79.95.
- Mahshid Mayar. 2022. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, xiii + 239 pp., $32.95.
- Marie-Laure Ryan. 2022. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, x + 226 pp., 6 illustr., 3 tables, $89.95.
