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Adventurers, Emissaries and Settlers: Ireland and Latin America
27-30 June 2007, National University of Ireland, Galway

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Abstract

Letters and Memoirs from South America: a 'New Ireland'?

Laura Izarra (Universidade de São Paulo)

The discourse of letters and memoirs varies as if it were a pendulum swinging back and forth, establishing a relationship between the construction of an external world to signify it and make it known, and the consciousness of an internal world that must be signified to oneself and/or to others.

This paper will analyse the process of a subject becoming semiotically present to the other in the former's absence, and how a 'New Ireland' (Marshall 2005) in South America was constructed through nineteenth-century personal narratives. William Bulfin's letters and other letters and memoirs compiled by Edmundo Murray in Devenir Irlandés (2004) will be focused to reveal the shaping of Irish diasporic identities.

The Society for Irish Latin American Studies