| Popis: |
The essays collected in this volume present a variety of new perspectives on an area of Irish literary production that has received much scholarly attention in recent years — ‘the Irish Gothic’. The inverted commas that so naturally seem to envelop this term suggest its contested nature. Variously described as a ‘canon’, ‘tradition’, ‘genre’, ‘form’, ‘mode’, and ‘register’, Irish gothic literature suffers from a fundamental terminolog- ical confusion, and the debate over exactly which term best applies has been both heated and, ultimately, inconclusive in the past 30 years. Richard Haslam — a contributor to the present volume — has ably traced the history of the term ‘Irish Gothic’, pointing out the ways in which, from the term’s introduction in the 1980s, literary scholars have strug- gled to find ‘an adequate critical language’ with which to discuss a body of literature that seems so resolutely to resist definition and cat- egorization.1 The dominant theorization of Irish gothic literature to emerge in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarship has been driven by psychoanalytic readings of the literary gothic in Ireland as the fictional representation of the repressed fears and anxieties of the minority Anglo-Irish population. In other words, what underwrites Irish gothic literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twen- tieth centuries is a mixed ‘fear and desire’ expressive of what Julian Moynahan calls the ‘ineluctably haunted’ nature of the ‘Anglo-Irish literary imagination’.2 |
