04.5 Research Case Studies
Understanding Irish Gothic literature 04 Jarlath Killeen
In the 1897 novel which first Irish Gothic — Much of my own research irresistible to hyphenated figures and introduced him to the world, Count Dracula has focused on answering questions like groups. As Ireland continues to grapple warns his enemies, ‘I spread over centuries this. I have demonstrated that the Gothic with its own in-between status, between and time is on my side’. He appears to in Ireland has a history that stretches tradition and post-modernity, Berlin and have been right. Not only is Dracula the back into the 17th and 18th centuries, Boston, Britain and Europe, the Gothic will best-known vampire of them all, he is and has had a major impact on shap- most likely continue to occupy a central one of the most recognisable characters ing ideas about what Ireland is like, and place in its literary scene. I am currently in literary history. what it means to claim particular kinds co-editing a collection of essays on Irish What is not as well-known, of Irish identity. Gothic literature for Edinburgh University however, is that he was the creation of My published work argues that Press with Christina Morin of the University a middle-class, Irish Protestant, Trinity what Frank O’Connor once termed “sub- of Limerick. graduate, who lived in Dublin for half of merged population groups” may well be his life. Moreover, if Bram Stoker provided attracted to and gravitate towards forms the world with the best example of the and genres that speak to their in-between male vampire, his fellow Dubliner, Joseph status, their religious, social, political and Sheridan Le Fanu, gave the world the personal liminality, and provide fantasy most significant female vampire ever in solutions to the real world difficulties Carmilla, the eponymous anti-heroine with which they are struggling. Through of his 1870 novella. An ‘unholy trilogy’ of monographs such as Gothic Ireland (2005), Trinity College-educated Gothic writers The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction is rounded-off by Charles Maturin, the (2013), essay collections on Bram Stoker author of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), (2014) and Sheridan Le Fanu (2017), and now almost completely forgotten except the organisation of international confer- by scholars of horror fiction and the stu- ences on the major Irish Gothic in Trinity dents they continue to require to read his College, my aim has been to generate more enormous and labyrinthine masterpiece. scholarly interest in ‘Irish Gothic’ literature, Why (and how) did middle-class Irish and also suggest possible explanations Anglicans from nineteenth-century Dublin about the wider implications of a genre generate such extraordinary influential which has such mesmeric attraction for monsters? More generally, why has Ireland readers and audiences around the world. produced such a long and distinguished The Gothic, which is packed full line of Gothic, horror and ‘weird fiction’ of ‘in-between’ monsters, like vampires writers? (who are living and dead), may well be
Jarlath Killeen received his BA from Trinity College Dublin and his PhD from University College Dublin. He joined the School of English in 2006 as a lecturer in Victorian literature, and he is now the Head of School. He was elected Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2010. He is the author of five monographs, and has published widely on the work of Oscar Wilde, and Irish Gothic fiction. He is currently completing a study of the discourses of childhood in seventeenth and eighteenth century Irish writing. Contact: [email protected]
Trinity College Dublin – The University of Dublin Understanding Irish gothic literature – Jarlath Killeen
≥ The Gothic, which is packed full of ‘in-between’ monsters, like vampires (who are living and dead), may well be irresistible to hyphenated figures and groups.
LEFT– Death Mask of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Courtesy of Anna and Francis Dunlop.
FAR LEFT – Bram Stoker by W. & D Downey photogravure, 1906 NPGx3769 Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London. Creative Commons.
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