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, it is worth reflecting on deviations from the norm they are seen to constitute – one based, as many of the accepted traits of Irish and British gothic literature of this period are, on relatively few titles, which are themselves, often too simplistically understood. The variety of (non)interactions with Ireland offered by a wider selection of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts underlines a much richer, more complex approach to gothic geography than is commonly attributed to Irish writers. Focus on the diversity of settings in
The gothic novel in Ireland, 1760–1830 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Against traditional scholarly understandings of Irish gothic fiction as a largely late-nineteenth century development, this study recovers to view 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.
acclaim, her works were routinely subject to critical censure linked to concerns over the growth of the literary marketplace, its perceived pandering to a growing middle-class readership, its disconcerting dominance by female readers and writers, and its effect on both the worth and accessibility of literature. The principal publisher of popular novels in Romantic-era Britain, 10 Lane was understood by critics to drive the period's troubling ‘bibliographic surplus’ and the associated ‘ “quantitative” rather than qualitative rise’ of the novel. 11 ‘Minerva’ thus became
1763, 1766, 1775, and 1790, and twice adapted for the stage as The Countess of Salisbury . 2 Yet, the novel remains little read today. In its twinned contemporary approbation and current neglect, Longsword stands in direct contrast to Walpole's The castle of Otranto (1764), which famously provoked controversy, especially on the publication of its revised second edition, and now enjoys the relatively uncontested reputation as the first British gothic novel. However, it is worth remembering that Walpole's tale and its self-description as ‘a Gothic story
easily to satisfy critical expectations for either ‘Irish Gothic’ or ‘the Gothic novel’, as detailed in this introduction, highlights the aims of this monograph: to interrogate scholarly preconceptions about the bodies of work associated with these monolithic terms and to draw a new conceptual map of Irish gothic literary production in the period 1760–1829. 3 Widely used today as identifying labels for gothic literature produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, ‘Irish Gothic’ and ‘the Gothic novel’ offer
remembered – don't always chime with reality. 11 If Batchelor's exciting discovery of Cuthbertson's birth threatens to plunge us even further into ‘the sublime of literary history’ noted in the Introduction, it also emphatically stresses how incomplete and often misguided our understanding of Irish gothic literary production in this period is. As detailed in the preceding chapters, our assumptions about late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century gothic literature in Britain lead to a deceptively
George Croly's Salathiel; a story of the past, the present, and the future (1828). Many of these terms, whether combinations or not, belong to the category of ‘generic pointers (historical romance, legends, tales, memoir, traditions)’ identified by Robert Miles as the ‘marketing cues’ British authors used in the latter half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century to position their texts as examples of ‘terror fiction’. 35 Other indicators, as Miles outlines, include
social. The social aspects of cousin marriage that anthropologists have observed are equally scrutinised by historians and scholars who examine family and marriage in eighteenth-century British society. Ruth Perry analyses the change in kinship structures throughout the eighteenth century as emphasising conjugal ties over consanguineal, stating that ‘the overdetermined emphasis on conjugality in
for the British gothics that feature incestuous couplings for their shock value and to further intensify an atmosphere of moral squalor.’ 63 However, in this novel the question of whether incestuous love is inspired before or after the revelation of kinship is vexed. The siblings’ reunion functions in some ways as a revelation of kinship bonds because, although Julia knows Ferdinand is her
(ed.), States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence and Social Change (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 15–34. See also: Lena Dominelli, ‘Betrayal of trust: a feminist analysis of power relationships in incest abuse and its relevance for social work practice’, British Journal of Social Work , 19:1 (1989), 291–308 and ‘Father–daughter incest