Bram Stoker’s dialects: nation, race, and speech in the early Irish fictions

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his early Irish novels, Bram Stoker uses Irish speech and Standard English to wrestle with Ireland’s precarious status in the United Kingdom. In The Primrose Path, Stoker distinguishes the speech of the Irish characters from the narrator’s Standard English, ultimately associating Standard English with the corrupting forces in London that doom the story’s protagonist. Contrarily, in The Snake’s Pass, Stoker ultimately imagines a joint Anglo-Irish Protestant rule that is enthusiastically accepted by the Irish Catholic residents, with Standard English literally overwriting local language. The curious and obscure tale “The Man from Shorrox’” offers a later, destabilised representation of England and Ireland, one in which the story’s Gothic doubling breaks down even the conventional attachment between spoken dialect and regional origin altogether.