Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890 ed. by Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (review)

The essays gathered in Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890 cover extensive ground across the long nineteenth century, but they share a determination to rethink the nature of gothic as it relates to Irish writing during a crucial period of history. The questions that linger over the volume and which drive a number of the chapters appear relatively straightforward, but are more difficult to answer: What constitutes gothic writing in the Irish context? Is it a genre or a mode? Is there anything like a gothic tradition in Irish writing, and if so, what does it look like? And, what are the uses of the gothic in the Irish context? Most of the chapters in Irish Gothics help us to see two specific things. First, they question the still commonplace critical assumption that the Irish gothic is essentially a Protestant mode (if not quite a genre) of writing, which enabled the Anglo-Irish minority to work through their repressed fears of the Catholic majority during a particularly difficult period of Irish history. With that in mind—and building on the scholarship of an important group of critics including Jarlath Killeen, Clare Connelly, and Christina Morin’s own previous work—the chapters cumulatively continue a process of correction to an understanding of Irish gothic that is too fixed or settled. Second, the chapters argue for a much more capacious understanding of gothic writing, one that focuses not only, or not even primarily, on the novel, and one that also shifts attention to a wide range of often under-studied material (chapbooks, poems, stories, folklore, periodical literature, etc.) in order to present a more multi-generic and, therefore, unexpected view of Irish gothic writing. In these two broad aims, the book is certainly a success.

Both the brief introduction to the volume and Morin’s opening chapter help lay out the terms of the debate and problems with the critical consensus on Irish gothic. Her chapter usefully maps the contours of the debate, in particular about the assumed links between Irish gothic and Protestant Ascendancy, and she challenges us to think across generic, as much as sectarian, boundaries when rethinking the gothic. She examines the use of a gothic past in Thomas Leland’s novel, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance (1762), Mary Delany’s story, “Marianna,” (1759; revised 1780) and Elizabeth Griffith’s dramatic poem, Amana (1764) in order to extend the reach of the gothic to a wide variety of prose and poetry, requiring a critical “reconfiguration of the generic parameters” of the gothic (28). This sort of approach is a real strength of the volume, shifting our attention away from the expected to texts less well-known or not conventionally understood as gothic at all. Anne Markey’s chapter on Irish folklore does something similar and makes the case that folkore and gothic writing—usually seen as distinct genres and quite separate discourses—are, in fact, closely related, and that contemporary readers would have been less clear about the boundaries between “the traditional tale or original fiction,” at a time in the early nineteenth century when folkore as a generic category had not yet come into being (95). For Markey, Tales of the Emerald Isle: or, Legends of Ireland (1828), written by “A Lady of Boston” and published in New York, embodies precisely this process of “Gothicization of Irish folkore,” and it does so by speaking to both Protestant and Catholic readers (108). The tales in the first half of the book “testify to the ongoing civility of Gaelic, Catholic Ireland” while the second half focuses “more on the virtues of the contemporary Protestant Ascendancy” (108). In other words, the use of gothic here provides something for everyone, perhaps especially important in its bid to attract an Irish-American reading public, a large community...