A new and essentially post-modernist approach to Irish cultural studies surrounding the great tragedy of the Famine, Morash's work assesses the representation of the Famine in 19th-century literature. Attacking the formal structure of the Famine as an historical 'event' per se, Morash approaches the Famine as essentially a textual creation; that is, the creation of an 'Event' as a cohesive narrative which has been contructed in human memory through a dissemination of individual texts representing a series of often disparate though interrelated mini-events, rumors, occurrences, and individual tragedies linked both geographically and chronologically. In assessing 19th-century Famine literature Morash's critical eye falls upon the great and obscur alike, and in so doing offers a compelllling argument for the textual fashioning of the historical 'event' which was the Great Irish Famine. (My review of this book also appears in the literary journal 'The Virginia Quarterly.')