“Generic instability: Gothic fiction from an Irish perspective in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century”

The definition ‘Gothic fiction’ does not point to a monolithic category: it rather comprises a diversity of narratives, thus challenging the only seemingly rigidly codified conventions characterizing it. The mutability of this genre, as well as its instability and heterogeneity, is widely acknowledged by critics. The Gothic is conventionally considered to have started in the mid-eighteenth century, to have had its heyday in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and to have flourished until its end. Recent criticism of Anglo-Irish Gothic, though, has extended the accepted temporal limits and anticipated The Castle of Otranto, locating the onset of the genre in the late seventeenth century, in fiction which is hybrid and unstable as to its generic form. The critical debate records divergent positions on the issue, which only demonstrates the vitality of the subject. The Gothic has been praised for its ability to express deep-seated fears, to give voice to political criticism, to reveal sexual anxieties, to host, in Freudian terms, the return of the repressed. This chapter focuses on Irish Gothic from a critical perspective: it takes into account the profusion of critical works on the subject and gives an overview of the development, characteristics, and internal tensions of the genre. With the support of some Gothic narratives from the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, this contribution explores characteristic features of the Irish Gothic, such as the issue of legitimacy, the obsessive return of the past, and the genre’s peculiar engagement with history, developing into a confrontation with present history after the 1798 Rebellion, which provided dreadful subject matter to Gothic literature.