The Gothic Novel in Ireland, C. 1760-1829 - Paperback

by Christina Morin (Author)

A compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland.

Front Jacket

OLD BACK BLURB The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 offers a compelling account of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Ireland. Countering the prevailing view of Irish gothic fiction as a largely late-nineteenth century development, this study uncovers a whole body of Irish literary production too often overlooked today. Its robust examination of primary texts, the contexts in which they were produced, and the critical perspectives from which they have been analysed, yields a rigorous account of the largely retrospective formal and generic classifications that have worked to eliminate eighteenth-century and Romantic-era Irish fiction from the history of gothic literature. The works assessed here powerfully demonstrate that what we now understand as typical of 'the gothic novel'- medieval, Catholic Continental settings; supernatural figures and events; an interest in the assertion of British modernity - is not necessarily what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers or writers would have identified as 'gothic'. They moreover point to the manner in which scholarly focus on the national tale and allied genres has effected an erasure of the continued production and influence of gothic literature in Romantic Ireland. Combining quantitative analysis with meticulous qualitative readings of a selection of representative texts, this book sketches a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period. As it does so, it persuasively positions Irish works and authors at the centre of a newly understood paradigm of the development of the literary gothic across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1830.

Back Jacket

OLD BACK BLURB
The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 offers a compelling account of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Ireland. Countering the prevailing view of Irish gothic fiction as a largely late-nineteenth century development, this study uncovers a whole body of Irish literary production too often overlooked today. Its robust examination of primary texts, the contexts in which they were produced, and the critical perspectives from which they have been analysed, yields a rigorous account of the largely retrospective formal and generic classifications that have worked to eliminate eighteenth-century and Romantic-era Irish fiction from the history of gothic literature.

The works assessed here powerfully demonstrate that what we now understand as typical of 'the gothic novel'- medieval, Catholic Continental settings; supernatural figures and events; an interest in the assertion of British modernity - is not necessarily what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers or writers would have identified as 'gothic'. They moreover point to the manner in which scholarly focus on the national tale and allied genres has effected an erasure of the continued production and influence of gothic literature in Romantic Ireland.

Combining quantitative analysis with meticulous qualitative readings of a selection of representative texts, this book sketches a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period. As it does so, it persuasively positions Irish works and authors at the centre of a newly understood paradigm of the development of the literary gothic across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1830.

Author Biography

Christina Morin is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick