The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction

Abstract

know far more about the subject of this book than I do and would have written a much better one on the subject than I have. Bernice Murphy occupies the office opposite my own and has not only had to suffer my constant attention-seeking for the last few years, graciously guiding me towards not only ever-more horrific viewing material and invaluable critical reading, but has also cheered me up when the going got tough. Darryl Jones, as usual, was a friend, colleague and wise guide and spent far more time talking to me about the book than either it or I deserved. Students in my classes on Literary Monsters had to endure my first public airing of many of the ideas that found their way in here and often patiently explained to me how misguided I am about such things Acknowledgements vii-so I thank them too. I am grateful to the anonymous readers who made very good suggestions which I tried to address as best I could. Some material from the Introduction and Chapter 1 first appeared in two articles published in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2006 and 2008) and is reprinted here with permission. To my wife, Mary Lawlor, and our daughter, Eilís, I owe the most gratitude. I offer them my love and dedicate the book to them both. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction Gothic trope of the past violently erupting into the present connect this minor horror film to a much longer cultural tradition which figures Ireland as a zone of weirdness, the supernatural and the pathological. At the time of shooting, Coppola was working for the veteran horror maestro Roger Corman, who had just wrapped up The Young Racers (a charmingly terrible film about racing car drivers and the women who love them), which he filmed all around Europe, finishing up in Ireland, and Dementia 13 was basically made with the left-over budget from Corman's film, with some of its actors thrown in, supplemented by additional players brought in from the Abbey Theatre. The Irish setting was, then, purely happenstance, since, as Kim Newman points out, Coppola would have filmed in Texas had he been there at the time. 2 Coppola got the most out of the location, however, and while naming the dead daughter Kathleen was probably simply a matter of invoking something suitably 'Oirish' for an American audience, it (un)happily results in the personal history of the Halorans becoming (unintentionally) emblematic of a national history in which the Irish are haunted by the ghost of a different Kathleen (ni Houlihan) and young men are led into perpetuating murderous deeds on her behalf. Concerning a ritual commemoration of death, and released three years before the Irish state celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising with tremendous pomp and circumstance, the film implicates such commemorative events in a cycle of madness and murder and suggestively anticipates the blame that would later be heaped on the anniversary festivities for the renewed campaign of the Irish Republican Army in 1969. Moreover, the IRA's Border Campaign had just finished in 1962...

Trauma, Motive and the Post-Troubles Psychopath in The Fall

“…This in turn signals his origins in Irish literary history, whose Gothic output has been conventionally attributed to the bad faith of the colonial era, and the guilt born by the colonizing class, particularly its women, for their role in oppressing the native Irish. It is also, of course, closely associated with the ultimate serial killer, Dracula, and the novel’s Irish author, Bram Stoker (Killeen 2014). In more recent times, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Barton 2019), the Gothic has emerged as a favored trope in Irish horror cinema as a way of addressing the traumatic legacy of the past.…”

Famine Roads and Big House Ghosts: History and Form in John Banville’s The Infinities / Estradas da Fome e Fantasmas da Casa Grande: História e Forma em The Infinities, de John Banville

“…Many critics, most notably Jarlath Killeen (2014), have suggested that the Irish Gothic is rooted in an "Irish Anglican Imagination" (34). 6 Killeen argues that this imagination stems from two aspects of the Anglo-Irish experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a crisis of identity created by their liminal position between an Irish and English identity, and an "enclave mentality" by the looming threat of the Catholic masses (38-39).…”

“Away, come away”: Moving Dead Women and Irish Emigration in W. B. Yeats’s Early Poetry

“…Significantly, these incarnations of the moving dead or supernatural woman are linked to Ireland, and indeed to British-colonised Ireland. Le Fanu grew up in difficult financial circumstances in Limerick during the disorders of the Tithe War and the Irish Famine, and Jarlath Killeen among others has identified the influence of "his family's isolation during the Tithe War" and of his opposition to Daniel O'Connell's politics on his literary work 6 . Stoker's Irish upbringing has led to Dracula and his female followers being interpreted variously as the Land Leaguers of the Irish Land War or the "gombeen men" of the Great Famine 7 , Charles Stewart Parnell and his followers 8 , "blood-gorged" Fenians 9 or the declining Protestant ascendancy 10 .…”