This chapter provides a crucial historical perspective on the repeated crises of hunger leading up to the Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Margaret Kelleher argues that “Although the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1851 is the best-known occurrence, the experience of large-scale famine in Ireland was of much longer duration.” Ireland of course had experienced a number of famines (smaller in scale) before the devastation of the 1840s. Kelleher points to “periods of great hardship in 1756–57, 1782–84, 1800–1801, 1816–18, 1822, and 1831,” and relies on the environmental history of the eighteenth century for a longue durée historicization of the Great Hunger.

This chapter argues that the agricultural and human disaster of the Great Irish Famine, and its broader cultural interpretation as a preventable tragedy, catalyzed an eco-nationalist consciousness within Irish political and literary circles. Literary landscapes functioned as tools of cultural preservation as well as a means through which a new Ireland might be constructed. Justin Dolan Stover demonstrates how this included political platforms that identified land ownership, agricultural self-sufficiency, and conservation as prerogatives of a politically independent state. The chapter argues that political writing and literary ecology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland often shared multifaceted concerns within anticolonial discourse.