This book is an original and compelling contribution to Irish cultural studies. Morash examines literary texts by writers such as William Carleton. Anthony Trollope, James Clarence Mangan, John Mitchel, and Samuel Ferguson to reveal how they interact with histories, sermons, and economic treatises and construct a narrative of one of the most important and elusive events in Irish history. Drawing on the methodology new historicist literary criticism, he examines the attempts of a wide range of nineteenth-century writing to ensure the memorialization of an event that seems to resist representation.