ABSTRACT
The proliferation of Gothic tropes in recent Irish fi ction for young readers may be partly attributable to a deep-rooted national fascination with a versatile discourse.1 It has become a critical commonplace that Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), following Joseph Addison’s essay ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712), helped shape the development of a genre that has appealed to adult readers for some 250 years. That the emergence of Gothic tropes, motifs, and themes in Irish fi ction predated the publication in 1764 of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, generally regarded as the fi rst Gothic novel, is less widely recognized. Nevertheless, the anonymous epistolary novel, The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley, ‘Written by a young lady’ and published in Dublin in 1760, creates an atmosphere of terror through a description of events, including the abduction of an orphaned and hapless heroine by a dastardly villain, while Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), a historical romance by the Church of Ireland academic and historian, Thomas Leland, foregrounds themes of usurpation and imprisonment in characteristically Gothic settings, such as dungeons, castles, and monasteries. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, other Irish writers, including, most famously, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker, expanded the frontiers of Gothic fi ction in ways that enhanced its continuing popularity and thematic complexity. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no critical consensus on what personal, cultural, or political concerns the texts of these three canonical writers illumine or, indeed, on the related question as to whether or not there is a specifi cally Irish Gothic genre. There is, however, general agreement that such work is invariably refl ective
of issues relating to confl icted national, as well as personal, identity (Haslam 2007; Kilfeather 2006; Killeen 2005; McCormack 1993).Perhaps the current predilection for Gothic tropes in novels by Irish writers about the vicissitudes of growing up is similarly refl ective of issues relating to Ireland’s coming of age as an independent state.
