Cross-disciplinary engagements have been a vital component of scholarly research on the Great Irish Famine since its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. Notable examples include the publication of the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (2012) and the convening of the International Network of Irish Famine Studies (I.N.I.F.S.) in 2014 by Professor Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University, Nijmegen), co-editor of these two collections. Both stem from conferences organised by the I.N.I.F.S. and thus make for complementary reading. Collectively, their essays unearth new perspectives on lived experiences during the Famine era and suggest new methodological possibilities for working through not only sources familiar to historians (such as newspapers, workhouse records, private diaries and correspondence) but also a wide range of literary and artistic media produced during and after the 1840s.

The editors of The Great Irish Famine: visual and material culture introduce terms from memory studies such as ‘premediation’ and ‘remediation’. The former term recognises how Famine-related representations in image or text have travelled within and between media formats while serving particular narrative purposes at each turn. Recurring tropes in works viewed and consumed by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic include depopulated hamlets, pauper women and children, eviction scenes, and coffin ships. As Niamh O'Sullivan shows, the work of painter Daniel Macdonald afforded affective dignity to an Irish rural peasantry whose poverty and customs relating to the supernatural meant they were dehumanised within British travel writing. Macdonald's treatment of his subjects owed something to the work of his father, James McDaniel, a prominent Cork folklorist who supplied material on folk customs and superstitions as well as fairy legends to the best-selling antiquary of the age, Thomas Crofton Croker. In a similar vein, Quebec painter Théophile Hamel drew from earlier French romantic works to depict Irish Famine victims in Montreal's fever sheds in his painting Le Typhus, as discussed by Jason King. The vacant stare of a male survivor cradling a corpse communicates the trauma of recent and ongoing experience, inviting viewers to consider the cost of such mental dislocation at the communal level. Fintan Cullen's chapter, in contrast, locates urban working-class figures of Irish background in everyday situations within American art traditions a half-century later. The portrayals of domestic maids and scrappy-looking youngsters in paintings such as George Wesley Bellows's Paddy Flannigan (1905) offer tantalising glimpses of an Americanised generation; as Cullen puts it, there is potential to ‘add an Irish dimension to American art history and an American dimension to Irish art history’ (p. 131).

‘Remediation’ describes the performative engagement with the past through processes of translation from paintings, texts and musical works. In this vein, Dawn Sherratt-Bado discusses how The Pogues’ 1987 song about Famine emigration, ‘Thousands are sailing’, informs Derek McCulloch's graphic novel Gone to Amerikay (2012), a work that explores elements of generational trauma between waves of emigrants to New York in 1870, 1960, and 2010. Sherratt-Bado offers an engaging discussion of McCulloch's use of revenant figures and places (such as Manhattan's once-infamous Five Points) in the plot as well as connections with landmark works in the genre (such as Art Speigelman's Maus) and Marianne Hirsch's influential concept of postmemory. In her chapter on Irish theatre, Shelly Troupe compares productions by the Galway-based Druid Theatre of Tom Murphy's play Famine (1969) in 1984 and 2012 in terms of their promotion, staging and critical reception. The marketing images on posters for these two productions contrast vividly, and Troupe reminds us that perceptions of the play not only changed over time but also varied between Irish, English and American audiences in 2012. Marguérite Corporaal's essay analyses the late-1990s television drama The hanging gale through nineteenth-century repertoires of rhetoric and image in fiction and sources such as the Illustrated London News. As Corporaal notes, the production and broadcast of The hanging gale chimed well with the sesquicentennial Famine commemorations. In contrast, Liam O'Flaherty's hopes that his novel Famine (1937) might make it to the screen were dashed by global conflict and a postwar Hollywood hostile to socialism. In an entertaining account of missed opportunities between O'Flaherty and John Ford, Bryce Evans recounts how Ford ultimately turned to The quiet man to cheer up (Irish-)American audiences, leaving O'Flaherty's work, per Evans's title, as ‘the greatest Famine film never made’.

The socio-political locations of some visual creators circumscribed their abilities to critique British government responses to the unfolding tragedy. Peter Gray discusses the case of John Doyle (‘H.B.’), a Catholic Irishman in London who shaped the emerging genre of political sketching within a conservative metropolitan atmosphere. Initially optimistic about the Russell government's policy for Ireland when it came into office in 1846, Doyle was more critical of the effectiveness of later remedial measures and lamented the collapse of Poor Law finances in the west of Ireland. Although he retained a strong Irish and Catholic personal identity, Doyle's artistic freedom nonetheless had its limits. And then there were those much closer to the Famine than Doyle whose visual works and writings provided scant insight into its reality. Ciarán Reilly shows how such indifference if not outright silence reigned within ‘a life undisturbed’ (p. 66) in his study of the diaries and sketches of John Plunket Joly, a rector's son from eastern County Offaly who later became a clergyman himself. Joly's depictions of flora, fauna, travelling musicians, and dances failed to address the calamities of starvation and eviction in the Clonsast district. Andrew Newby's essay on Finland's famine years (1860s) also illustrates dynamics of silence and amnesia, as well as the role of grass-roots ‘commemorative communities’ in constructing memorials and museums, work that the Finnish state has yet to accomplish. Absent too was a Russia-blaming, anti-imperial narrative among a people subsequently uprooted by civil war (1918) and the Second World War. In this comparative study, Newby's mapping of memorials to Finland's ‘Great Hunger Years’ (p. 183) in relation to mortality in the late 1860s shows strong correlations. Unlike the case of Ireland, no memorials to Finland's famine exist beyond its borders.

Elsewhere, discussions of material culture feature in the chapters by Melissa Fegan and Lisa Godson. Lace was an important employment outlet for girls in the 1840s and 1850s, and Fegan explores the life of Susanna Meredith through her lacemaking school in Cork and her later writing (after her emigration to England), which included fiction that juxtaposes rules-conscious Anglo-Irish women with their wild-blooded Celtic counterparts. Godson utilises the Irish Catholic Directory to track the intrusion of beads, statues and cheap prints into households during the post-Famine ‘devotional revolution’. Here, the parish mission movement was pivotal in shaping popular understandings of the sacred and profane in Rome-directed devotional rituals. The Sacred Heart could be found in both private parlours and public processions, producing ‘a newly affective form of spirituality’ (p. 102).

This innovative and handsomely produced volume (containing thirty-nine visuals) challenges the idea of a great silence befalling post-Famine generations in Ireland and its diaspora, and suggests ways in which the dimensions of Famine memory might be evidenced through multiple vernacular sources.

The twelve essays in The Great Irish Famine and social class seek to explore the nature of class relations during this turbulent era within the familiar landlord-tenant framework, while extending perspectives on such relations beyond this two-class model. Just how wide were the social, cultural, and religious gulfs between the two classes? And how did social distinctions materialise among the largely rural and small-town tenantry? The editors’ lengthy introduction situates the volume well within the historiography. Paweł Hamera's comparison of landlord-tenant relationships in Ireland and partitioned Poland in the pre-Famine decades, drawing from press reports and travel writing, reveals similar descriptions and evaluations of peasant ‘wretchedness’. While there were critiques of Irish landlords on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1840s, Peter Gray demonstrates how the likes of William Sharman Crawford in County Down put their free-trading sensibilities on hold to advocate for progressive solutions that would alleviate the plight of Irish tenants. Crawford opposed the ban on outdoor relief in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1847 and supported efforts to suspend brewing and distilling. Farther south, as Jason King documents, Stephen de Vere of County Limerick accompanied his household servants to Canada in 1847, hoping to guide them to new lives as settler colonists on the frontier west of Toronto. De Vere's published account of his harrowing experience of steerage on the transatlantic voyage influenced subsequent amendments to legislation regarding emigrant vessels. And although de Vere's attempt to settle his servants was not a success, his experiences in Canada resulted in his conversion to Catholicism before his return to Ireland in 1848.

Such ‘improving’ landlords also found a place within later fictional works alongside less cheery images of labourers’ cabins and overcrowded workhouses, as essays by Marguérite Corporaal, Melissa Fegan and Christopher Cusack show. For Fegan, domestic comforts could still exist within cabins, countering the often bleak characterisations of writers such as Anthony Trollope, while Corporaal argues that the ‘literary workhouse’ could inspire radical change as well as reflect social inequities. Cusack analyses two novels by Irish women novelists (Louise Field and L. T. Meade) published around the turn of the twentieth century in which characters from the ascendancy embrace nationalist politics in Famine-era Ireland, with both authors integrating events such as the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, the exile of revolutionaries to Australia and the arrival of food aid from the United States.

The humanitarian approaches of Crawford and de Vere appear exceptional, however, when placed against evidence of a gentry and a professional class that recognised their shared interests and maintained their social distance from the tenantry. Declan Curran uncovers a largely risk-adverse rhetoric within the annual reports of joint-stock banks, for example, and in an exemplary navigation of sources for the Parsonstown (Birr) workhouse, Andrés Eiríksson maps the parsimony and mismanagement of its Board of Guardians at every turn of the crisis. Also telling was the opposition to outdoor relief of the principal figure in that locality, the earl of Rosse.

Studies of evictions invite consideration of wider sections of the social spectrum, not least those directly involved in their execution. As Ciarán Reilly explains, many evictions were met with little resistance, community members could be complicit, and national and provincial newspapers varied in their reporting and commentary, usually along partisan lines. While many evictions slipped out of social memory, those involving landlord assassinations did not. Evicting landlords included not only demesne-dwellers and absentees but also merchants, shopkeepers and institutions such as Trinity College.

On the diaspora front, Famine emigrants became inserted into class relations in British and American societies. Lewis Darwen and Brian Gurrin study accounts of deposition testimony taken during inquiries into Irish refugee deaths in northern England, where Irish arrivals had no legal settlement and were viewed by local media as devious and potentially diseased figures draining rate-payers’ resources, far more so than English paupers. Many begged, especially those speaking only Irish. In such a socio-legal context, and with employment scarce and prison space limited, about 15,000 Irish paupers were deported from Liverpool in 1847. For Peter O'Neill, meanwhile, Irish-American fiction communicated the importance of wealth, education, and upward mobility in white Anglo-American society, modified to take account of Catholic communitarianism. Novels both entertained and instructed these white Catholics in their ascension to middle-class respectability and an idealised American citizenship.

Readers of these two collections will appreciate their methodological rigour, analytical nuance and showcasing of a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Both reflect well the achievements of the I.N.I.F.S., and the directions for future research signalled within them will serve to maintain the vibrancy of Irish Famine studies, not least through continued explorations of the comparative and transnational dimensions.