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.

Fionnuala Dillane is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is author of Before George Eliot: Marian Evans in the Periodical Press, joint winner of the 2014 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize.

Naomi McAreavey is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published widely on the 1641 rebellion, and her edition of The Letters of the First Duchess of Ormonde is forthcoming.

Emilie Pine is Lecturer in Modern Drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of The Politics of Irish Memory (Palgrave, 2011), incoming Editor of the Irish University Review, and founding Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network.