Charles Robert Maturin's sixth and final novel, The Albigenses, a romance, is a kind of textual house of mirrors. Maturin had already dabbled with the historical novel form as later popularised by Sir Walter Scott in The Milesian chief and, arguably, Fatal revenge. By current critical descriptions of the historical novel, however, these texts, now narrowly defined as national tale and Gothic novel, respectively, do not conform to Scott's model. To judge The Albigenses by markers of chronological or strictly factual accuracy, as Dale Kramer does, is to hold the novel to entirely different standards than those of Scott's historical novel. Fearful of social revolution in Ireland, The Albigenses focuses on revolution of a different kind: the recurrence of the past.

Charles Robert Maturin's fiction, with its explicit use of Gothic themes and motifs, provides a perfect window into the continued influence of the Gothic novel in Irish Romantic fiction. A revenant-like figure, Maturin continues to exert something akin to the 'horrible fascination' attributed to the 'unearthly glare' of his living-dead creation. A kind of ghost lurking in the corridors of Irish literature and literary history, Maturin is very much a Derridean spectre haunting literary production in Romantic Ireland and beyond. The violence of the past, even when acknowledged, will always form the bulk of the Irish individual's social inheritance. Similarly, previous literary forms will continue to influence, however subtly, later literary texts long after they have ostensibly died away. The chapter also presents some of the key concepts of this book.

Incomprehension suffered by Ireland and its people at the close of Women; or pour et contre has been a frequent response to Charles Robert Maturin's fifth and most famous novel, Melmoth the wanderer. As Maturin wrote Melmoth, Ireland became, in essence, 'symbolically spread' throughout the novel by way of the paratext. Despite the geographical and temporal differences between tales, as well as the huge cast of characters, the composite stories repeat, reflect, and mirror each other. Such repetition and reflection constructs Melmoth's various tales as, in effect, a house of mirrors, a convoluted maze of mirrors around which the fairgoer-cum-reader must navigate to find the exit/conclusion. Recalling earlier Gothic novels by way of its interpolated tales, Melmoth contains repeated direct references to both the Gothic novel as a form and specific examples of the Gothic novel.

Matthew Lewis's The Monk begins with an apparent non sequitur. The Monk's subversion of sensibility may have panicked Ann Radcliffe into a riposte, one imposing closure on Lewis's worrying gaps, but it also prompted a reassessment of her earlier work. Radcliffe's reassertion of the denotative function of language pulls The Italian back towards naturalism, as is evident from her stress on the veridical genealogy of her text. Radcliffe's development of the female Gothic sublime and interiority may be seen as examples of self-fulfilling exercises of power within a 'despotic' context; The Italian differs in trying to analyse that context. Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: Or, The Moor, is in two respects a female version of Lewis's The Monk. A woman, Victoria di Loredani, occupies Ambrosio's role, while the sexual politics of the Gothic are viewed from a feminist perspective.

The opening pages of The House by the Church-yard are a dies irae, day of wrath, or even Day of Judgement for the Irish eighteenth century. In strict literary terms, The House by the Churchyard owes less to Scott than to the costume novels of Harrison Ainsworth, and also to the (anti-)puritan fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The innumerable elements and sub-elements into which The House by the Church-yard might be analysed are arranged in a centrifugal pattern precisely so as to screen from scrutiny the actual centre from which they issue. The House by the Church-yard combines two never wholly reconcilable aspects. It excavates the past, laying bare the evidence of deceit and homocide. It assimilates the past, transforming the ruddy-handed Eliabethan lord of creation into a dreamy paterfamilias or love-struck soldier.

Elizabeth Bowen's novel had a background of sexual irregularity but its eventual concentration on character largely excludes issues of 'gender-identity', opting instead for more thoroughly ontological questions. One has no desire to repatriate Bowen, but rather to explore her distinctive insight into the processes of dissolution, reformation and further dissolution which contribute to the seemingly solid notion of character. Yet one may feel that something more thoroughly radical is at work in Bowen's fiction, and nowhere is a radical attitude towards character more evident than in The Heat of the Day. Published in February 1949, but written during the war, this novel constitutes not only an interrogation of fictional character as a realistic device but also an expose of Irish or English identity as a fiction. In the distinctly more threatening situation of 1941, Bowen's fiction quite naturally admits more of the invasionary danger facing England.

The Heat of the Day might now be seen as a religious work, even though its setting will have to be identified as the Garden of Gethsemane, its theme doubt, and its god decisively absent. The Heat of the Day is the major achievement of Elizabeth Bowen's career during the war years and immediately after. There is a substantial body of other work, both fiction and non-fiction, with an investigation of the intimate past occupying a prominent position in the latter category. Yet, writing in the New Statesman in 1941, Bowen went to great lengths to clarify the independent Irish position in relation to belligerence and neutrality, to the bombing of English cities, and to the war generally.

The revelation of character has been presented as the supreme achievement of the novelist's art, its depth and complexity surpassing even the remarkable personalities of the ordinary world. For Victorians, names were imposed by inheritance or marriage, and the coercive implications in relation to a sense of character may be noted. The distinctive characteristics of Sheridan Le Fanu's fictional use of names are its lack of system combined with its pervasive reduplication: both constitute forms of coercion. The biblical quotation or motto is only one instance of Le Fanu's incorporation of brief or fragmentary textual matter into the narrative of novel or story. The contribution of names to characterisation is particularly tantalising in Le Fanu's treatment of women. Le Fanu's anxious inquiry into questions of historical responsibility, character construction and sexuality inflicted its own damage on the novelist.

Art seeks to control art in those scenes where Rembrandt's name or Wouvermans' is invoked. Even in the apparently superficial and immediate world of Brandon Hall, the narrator of Wylder's Hand had experienced in sleep the projective violence of art. In Guy Deverell and Wylder's Hand, the incidents apparently reactivating pictures are finally explained in mundane terms; in contrast, the short stories remain generally cryptic in their introduction of pictures. Explanation of a picture's significance or apparent power in the novels goes hand-in-hand with their rationalisation of the supernatural. In contrast, the short work is gnomic as to demons, ghosts and vampires as well as to painters' names. Sheridan Le Fanu's use of painting provides the opportunity to consider the problem of classification of literary genre. Words associated with painting and the depiction of lighted scenes proliferate, 'perspective', 'shade', 'dusky light', 'shadow', 'shadow' again, 'dark', and even perhaps 'lightly'.

In quality of writing, the contrast between novels and tales in Sheridan Le Fanu's last years was stark. The demonstration of seriality provided by Jean-Paul Sartre looks strikingly ill-suited to the needs of Le Fanu's readers. In the late nineteenth century, writers sought to protect literature from the effect of seriality by a kind of pure writing, which would reflect back to each isolated reader, each solipsistic consciousness. Le Fanu's particular instance of serial displacement from one character on to another lies not so much on the axis of pain/pleasure but rather in the ethical domain of guilt/innocence. Whether one turns to Jurgen Habermas and his theory of 'the bourgeois social sphere' or to Sartre's idea of urban alienation as 'serial unity', a radicalised view of the modern city is wholly compatible with this reading of Le Fanu's late fiction.

This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1706 and 1750 connected with supernaturalism. It is a commonplace that Gothic writing developed in reaction against the rules of neo-classical criticism. The aim of John Dennis's treatise as a whole was to show the necessary interdependence of religion and poetry, and the importance of strong emotions in both. Shakespeare saw how useful the popular superstitions had been to the ancient poets: he felt that they were necessary to poetry itself. Although William Collins ostensibly eschews the use of 'false themes' for himself, his emotive treatment of the supernatural material he recommends to Home makes him a precursor of the Gothic novelists. In the 1790s, Ann Radcliffe frequently cited his poetry in her fiction and journals.

This chapter deals directly with the discursive, with aesthetic discourses where the issue of gender is acutely present. In elaborating the discursive structures that encode gender within the Gothic, the chapter assumes that there is a sufficient congruence between sex and gender as to warrant the terms 'male' and 'female' Gothic. Genius, novelty, the sublime, the visual and reverie all offer points of theoretical concentration, where the hygienic self bunches into discursive thickness, forming Gothic texture. At the centre of the hygienic self lies associationism with its normative patterns of mental behaviour. But in most Gothic writing the negations of the hygienic self are not, simply, outrageously permitted; rather they occur in the context of their systematic antitheses. In Gothic writing, the patterning that promises meaning, reveals meaning of a psychological, or uncanny, kind. The Gothic aesthetic internalized the tenets of ideal presence as its pedagogic defence.

Cultural memory and Irish Romantic literary criticism from the time of Charles Robert Maturin's death to the present day have posthumously suppressed Maturin and his works. This suppression has denied the evident influence he had on a wide range of literature in his own lifetime and beyond. To speak of Maturin's 'radiance' is to argue that his presence and influence was felt continuously throughout his lifetime and after his death, as was argued in the 1892 edition of Melmoth the wanderer. Despite Honore de Balzac's desire to renounce the Gothic mode, his very dependence on Maturin's infamous wanderer highlights the ways in which the Gothic continued spectrally to possess nineteenth-century literary imagination.

The Gothic aesthetic and hygienic self gain their particular accents during the latter half of the eighteenth century; during the nineteenth, they become less distinct while others are heard. This chapter addresses the effect this had on Gothic writing during the 1820s and beyond and the genealogical consequences. Byron's Werner; or, The Inheritance: A Tragedy, a dramatic adaptation of Harriet Lee's novella, The German's Tale: Kruitzner, is an instance of rewriting at the margins of the Gothics classic period. The geographical and temporal setting, 'Germany' in 1633, towards the end of the Thirty Years War, highlights the 'Gothic cusp', a period when the feudal and modern eras were understood to overlap. Insofar as Kruitzner sets it out as typical, the house of Siegendorf, like all Gothic houses, is based on 'mystery and blood', violence shrouded by an obscurantist myth of noble origin.