In this introduction to the special issue, the editors read Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and its circuitous afterlives through the lens of recent, revised critical understandings of globalgothic. Driven by its striking depiction of evil, its eccentric narrative structure, and its atmospheric intensity, Melmoth the Wanderer's cultural impact reverberated across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures and visual media, an influence which continues to evolve to this day. Significantly, for a text preoccupied with the problematics of translation, transcription, and transliteration, Melmoth's network of global influence is fraught with anomalies and complications. From its first appearance in nineteenth-century Russia in French translation to its rediscovery in twentieth-century Latin America, the global afterlives of Melmoth expose the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of transnational textuality, both in Maturin's era and our own. The introduction ends with an overview of the essays collected in this volume – the first scholarly study dedicated to tracing the many afterlives of Maturin's Melmoth.

This article offers a transnational mapping of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) that links fictional narrative both to the contexts of its production and dissemination in a global literary marketplace and to its network of influence, and more particularly, its reputation and afterlife within what Pascale Casanova has influentially called ‘the world republic of letters’. It first considers Melmoth’s internal geography and the novel’s use of space in relation to Maturin’s quest for ‘literary capital’. 1 It then expands upon, in Casanova’s terms, Melmoth’s ‘ littérisation’, namely, the process by which, in spite of its often-unfavourable contemporary reception, Melmoth was transformed from a state of ‘literary inexistence to existence’ via translation and adaptation. 2 Finally, it explores Northern Irish Big Telly Theatre Company’s 2012 dramatic adaptation as evidence of Melmoth’s littérisation.

This article explores the legacies of Melmoth, the title character of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in the context of the Irish Gothic tradition. I argue that Melmoth's corporeal monstrosity is symbolically reified in subsequent texts, and that consequently Irish Gothic fiction is both possessing of and possessed by Melmoth. Exploring this in-between space where Melmoth is re-fashioned and re-imagined, I ask what this means for the Irish Gothic tradition and the processes of reflection and self-reflection these texts enact. I therefore trace Melmoth's influence by surveying the works both of Anglo-Irish writers and of Irish Gothic writers outside this particular tradition. In particular, my argument examines tropes of doubling and mirroring in such texts so as to highlight Melmoth's presence as a symbolic and semiotic revenant.

Circumlocution has been an important stylistic feature of the Gothic novel since its inception in the eighteenth century. Might this rhetorical feature be thought of in national or even geopolitical terms? Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe in the eighteenth century had linked circumlocution to a Shakespearean blending of comedy and tragedy that marked a distinctively British artistic sensibility against the constraints of French neo-classicism. However, Maturin’s use of the trope in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought in new national and transnational inflections linked to the central character’s own ability to circle around the world and the presence of colonised others within the text. This article asks whether circumlocution after Maturin’s novel becomes an end in itself, a walking around the borders of speech and meaning that would appeal to later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire.

In one of his published sermons, Charles Robert Maturin writes: ‘Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead – we walk upon our ancestors – the globe itself is one vast churchyard.’ Travelers in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) are drawn to ruins, to historical texts, and to spectacles of death, all in an imperfect attempt to comprehend, recall, and communicate the mystery of suffering and mortality on a global, transnational scale. Drawing from Paul Westover’s seminal study of ‘necromanticism’ in which he discusses Romantic-era practices of memorializing and communing with the dead via historical writing and travel, I will read Mary Shelley’s plague novel The Last Man (1826) as a text that borrows from Maturin’s theory of the tenuous communicability of historical memory. I argue that Shelley echoes Maturin’s interest in a global necromanticism in which the living seek to remember and commemorate the dead through language, extending this practice of commemorative remembrance on a transnational scale. In so doing, Shelley also incorporates Maturin’s darker critique of these global commemorations as at once compulsive yet insufficient.

Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer had immediate, rich, and enduring influence upon Russian literature: Aleksandr Pushkin, after reading it in French translation in 1823, cited it in his own 1833 novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, introducing the adjective ‘ mel’moticheskii’ (‘Melmoth-like’) to Russian. The titular demon of Mikhail Lermontov's dramatic poem The Demon (c. 1838) emulates Melmoth, while Maturin's novel was significant both for Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Maturin's novel was just as widely read and (sometimes) travestied within Russia as the work of other Gothic-fantastic authors, like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Lord Byron. Yet no detailed English-language scholarly overview exists of Melmoth's Russian epigones, from Pushkin's Onegin to lesser-known, later imitations. This essay will clarify Maturin's impact on Russian literature by identifying the Russian authors most clearly influenced by Melmoth, from the dawn of Romanticism to the nostalgic fictions of Russian émigré and dissident authors in the early twentieth century.

This article focuses on Mike Flanagan’s Haunting series and brings the pervasive background ghost to the foreground of analysis by studying that which is, as expressed by young Nell in The Haunting of Hill House, ‘right here the whole time’ and yet cannot be seen. Using Jacques Derrida’s seminal notion of ‘spectre’ and its related ‘visor effect’ concept to build textual analyses of both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, this study demonstrates the ways in which the background ghost both reflects and challenges conventional horror dynamics of visuality and spectacularity. Such dynamics extend beyond the story space and involve the implied and near-sighted spectator, at once imperfect ghost-hunter and hunted by the background ghost. Such pervasive mechanics of haunting allow Flanagan to create a space of highly contemporary terror oozing from the screen to the implied viewer.