I rish G othic

Abstract

“Irish Gothic” is a nebulous term that covers a very large amount of writing emanating from, relating to, written in and/or about Ireland in the modern period. There is much debate over when Irish Gothic “emerged” (if that is the right word – see McCormack 1991, Backus 1999, Killeen 2005 for different approaches to the question of beginnings); what texts should be included in an examination of the area; and even whether Irish Gothic is a “tradition,” “genre,” or “mode” (see McCormack, 1991; Killeen 2006; Haslam 2007a, 2007b). Irish literary history is still a rather underdeveloped field. Although the masterpieces of Irish modernism (see modernism ) have received a great deal of critical attention, the fame of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett have rather distracted consideration away from other writers and areas in serious need of detailed socioliterary mapping. Irish realism has, perhaps, suffered most seriously from neglect (see John Wilson Foster 2008 for a rectifying of this gap; for a good indication of the amount of realism published in this period, see Loeber and Loeber 2006). In tandem with – and probably contributing to – the disregard of Irish realism, there has been a relatively strong interest in Irish “nonrealism,” of which tradition the Gothic is a major component, although this attention has mostly been directed toward a few major practitioners such as Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (see le fanu, joseph sheridan ), Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker (see stoker, bram ), ignoring “minor” figures such as Regina Maria Roche, Stephen Cullen, or Anne Fuller. In fact, Irish Gothic may be the one area of Irish fiction, besides modernism, to have received due attention, and this needs some explaining.