5 Commonly understood to begin with Horace Walpole's The castle of Otranto (1764), its defining characteristics include, as David Punter outlines, ‘an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of suspense’. ‘The Gothic novel’, in turn, signifies ‘ strain of the novel’ that developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century and enjoyed notable popular success before exhausting itself in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. 4 It is typified by the novels of Victorian writers such as Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), although its origins are often traced to Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). ‘Irish Gothic’ thus speaks of fiction that explores the mixed fears and desires of a minority Anglo-Irish population threatened – imaginatively if not actually – by the unsettled native Catholics over whom they maintained precarious control. 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 a helpful shorthand for referencing the shared themes, settings, and topoi that tie authors and texts together in recognisable gothic literary traditions. Yet, its continued neglect, driven by its failure 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. 2 It will seem an odd choice with which to begin a discussion of ‘the Gothic novel’ in Ireland, as promised by the title of this book. In her 2006 chapter, ‘The gothic novel’, Siobhán Kilfeather identified the story as an early instance of Irish gothic fiction, but it has yet to receive serious scholarly analysis in studies of either eighteenth-century Irish or gothic literature. 1 It tells of the troubled relationship between the Protestant Mr Pansfield – the descendant of ‘an English family that had received a grant of some lands in that country from Queen Elizabeth’ – and his Catholic wife, Elvina Butler, as they weather the ‘storms’ then ravaging the country (‘Conjugal fidelity’, pp. Published in 1780 in a collection of tales titled Novellettes, selected for the use of young ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Griffith's little known but compelling short fiction ‘Conjugal fidelity’ narrates a domestic romance set against the backdrop of the 1641 Rebellion, or ‘Irish Massacre’. Introduction: locating the Irish gothic novel
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