Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction
By (Author) Christina Morin
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
20th October 2011
United Kingdom
Classifications
Physical Properties
Hardback
224
Width 138mm, Height 216mm
Description
A self-described "disappointed Author", Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) has been largely relegated to the margins of literary history since his death in 1824. Yet, as this study demonstrates, he exerted a fundamental influence on the development of Irish fiction in the early nineteenth century. In particular, his novels dramatically underscore the continuing presence and deployment of the Gothic mode in Romantic Ireland - an influence now frequently overlooked in critical attention to the national and regional forms popularized in Ireland in the wake of Anglo-Irish Union (1801). Working from Jacques Derrida's influential theory on ghosts, this study positions Maturin as the cornerstone on which to build a new paradigm of Irish Romantic fiction, one which accounts for the spectral traces of the past - cultural, social, and political - evident in early-nineteenth century Irish fiction. As it does so, it calls for renewed critical and popular attention to an author who himself continues spectrally to emerge in the works of his literary successors. -- .
Reviews
Illuminating
...a welcome addition to Maturin criticism.
What is it about Ireland's past that haunts the imagination To an extent every Irish authorhas raised that question, but none other than Maturin has given it, as Morin reveals, such a vast array of complex and troubling answers.
This book is valuable for scholars interested in Irish romanticism, and in the Gothic more generally, and through its intelligent analysis of Maturins novels will no doubt succeed in its attempt to raise his literary ghost.
Overall, Morins work offers an impassioned sense of the importance of Maturins haunting presence in our literary history. Her conclusion offers a survey of Maturins influence on writers from Baudelaire to John Banville, and a call for the source of that influence to be better understood. This volume is an important contribution to that project.
Author Bio
Christina Morin is an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where she is working on a project titled 'The Gothic Novel in Ireland, 1760-1830'
