Description:
Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion provides a comprehensive account of the extent to which Gothic can be traced in Irish cultural life from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, across both elite and popular genres, and through a range of different media, including literature, cinema, and folklore. It responds, in particular, to the understanding that Gothic is ubiquitous in Irish literature. Rather than focus specifically or exclusively on the oft-studied Irish Gothic foursome - Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker - this companion turns attention to overlooked 'minor' figures such as Regina Maria Roche, Stephen Cullen, and Anne Fuller. At the same time, it considers the multi-generic nature of Irish Gothic, thinking beyond fiction and, in particular, the novel, as the Gothic genre par excellence. The collection thus affords fresh perspectives on Irish Gothic and its pervasiveness in Irish culture from the eighteenth century to today.
Brief description: Jarlath Killeen is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He has published extensively on Irish gothic fiction, including Gothic Ireland (2005), and The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). His most recent monograph is Imagining the Irish Child: Discourses of Childhood in Irish Anglican Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2023).
Review Quotes: This outstanding collection fulfils the urgent need for a throughgoing reconsideration of the Irish gothic across genres, genders, periods, and confessional communities. Not only have the editors radically and expansively redefined the Irish gothic, but by resituating the gothic in relation to Irish and British literary history, they have productively redefined the genre itself. Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion represents an authoritative departure that simultaneously offers a broad account of the scholarship that heretofore defined the field.--Margot Backus, University of Houston