Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction

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’.

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 Maturin’s novels will no doubt succeed in its attempt to ‘raise’ his literary ghost.Overall, Morin’s work offers an impassioned sense of the importance of Maturin’s haunting presence in our literary history. Her conclusion offers a survey of Maturin’s 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.

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsChronology of Maturin’s lifeIntroduction: Spectres of Maturin; or, the ghosts of Irish Romantic fiction1. Reviving Maturin: the life and works2.Communing with the dead: the medium and media of Fatal revenge3.Conjuring Glorvina: The wild Irish boy and the national tale4.Witnessing the past: the textual ruins of The Milesian chief5.Narrating history: the burden of words in Women; or pour et contre6.Paratextual possession: re-reading Melmoth the wanderer7.Re-thinking Scott’s revolution: The Albigenses as historical novelConclusion: Room for more: the future for Maturin researchSelect bibliographyIndex