Prof Melissa Fegan

Professor Fegan teaches on the BA English Literature, BA English Language and Literature, and MA Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture programmes. Her teaching largely focuses on literature from the nineteenth century to the present day, and she supervises undergraduate dissertations on a wide range of issues. She supervises PhD students working on nineteenth-century literature, Irish literature, Neo-Victorian literature and historical fiction.

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Professor Fegan has published widely on literary representations and cultural memory of the Great Famine in Ireland, and on nineteenth-century Irish literature more broadly. She is currently working on the Famine in post-independence Irish literature, the hotel in Irish fiction, and nationalism in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Lady Wilde.

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Books

• Literature and the Irish Famine 1845-1919 (Clarendon Press, 2002).
• Wuthering Heights: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008).

Editions

• ‘Introduction’, Emily Brontë, Cumbres Borrascosas [Spanish academic edition of Wuthering Heights] (Editorial Vicens Vives, 2018).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

‘Young Ireland and Beyond’, in Matthew Campbell (ed.), Irish Literature in Transition 1830–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 38-57.

‘The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901–2015’, in Liam Harte (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 407-423.

‘How the Other Three-Quarters Lived: The Cabin in Famine Literature’, in Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray (eds), The Great Famine and Social Class: Conflicts, Responsibilities, Representations (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 29-50.

‘“This Most Humane Commerce”: Lacemaking during the Famine’, in Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-Fitzgerald (eds), The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures (Liverpool University Press, 2018), 110-127.

‘The Moral Economy of the Irish Hotel from the Union to the Famine’, in Susanne Schmid and Monika Elbert (eds) Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth Century Literature: Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing (Routledge, 2017)

‘“Of every land the guest”: Aubrey de Vere’s travels’, Studies in Travel Writing, 20:2 (2016), 135-148.

‘“The Tottering, Fluttering, Palpitating Mass”: Power, Hunger and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Literary Responses to the Great Famine’, in Enda Delaney and Breandán Mac Suibhne (eds) Ireland’s Great Famine and Popular Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 34-58.

‘Waking the Bones: the Famine in Contemporary Irish Literature’, in Ruud van den Beuken, Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen (eds) Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine (Peter Lang, 2014), 157-174.

‘“Every Irishman is an Arab”: James Clarence Mangan’s Eastern “Translations”’, Translation and Literature, 22:2 (Summer 2013), 195-214.

‘William Carleton and Famine’, William Carleton Summer School, August 2012http://www.williamcarletonsociety.org/site/talks/talksunderconstruction.html

"That heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds”: Famine and Family in Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea’, in Neo-Victorian Families, eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Rodopi, 2011).

‘The Great Famine in Literature, 1845-1896', in Julia M. Wright (ed.), A Companion to Irish Literature, vol. 1 (Blackwell, 2010).

‘“Like a wail from the tomb, / But of world-waking power”: James Clarence Mangan's "A Vision: A. D. 1848", The Great Famine and the Young Ireland Rising', in 1848: The Year the World Turned?, eds. Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy (Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

‘“Something so utterly unprecedented in the annals of human life”: William Carleton and the Great Famine’, in Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria's Ireland?: Ireland and Britishness, 1837-1901(Four Courts Press, 2004).

"Isn't it your own country?”: The Stranger in Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature’, Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004), 31-45.

‘The Traveller's Experience of Famine Ireland’, Irish Studies Review, 9:3 (2001), 361-71.

• BA
• MSt
• DPhil
• PGC Learning and Teaching (HE)
• FHEA