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4 - The Gothic novel
- John Wilson Foster, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel
- Published online:
- 28 January 2007
- Print publication:
- 14 December 2006, pp 78-96
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Summary
Origins of the Gothic novel
[W]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or conversant with terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.
It is something for a man to be able to walk from his own door to his place of worship without being shot at from behind his father’s tombstone.
After 1757, a large number of novels in English adopted, explored, adapted and perverted the aesthetic theories set out in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. They did this through new attention to landscape, through the deployment of historical settings and themes, and through an interest in the sensational and the supernatural. The most obvious influence of Burke's treatise is found in the subgenre of terror fiction that quickly identified itself as Gothic.
The sublime is produced by great and terrible objects, including natural phenomena like oceans, mountains and waterfalls, as well as great buildings whose size overwhelms the spectator. Burke emphasises that a certain amount of obscurity is necessary for the creation of terrible effects. To enter a ruined abbey on a moonlit night would be to invite the experience of the sublime. Small and pleasing objects are beautiful, and, in terms of landscape, the beautiful is associated with domesticity and cultivation. Burke leads his readers to associate the sublime with masculinity and the beautiful with femininity.
6 - Irish feminism
- from Part I - Cultural politics
- Edited by Joe Cleary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Claire Connolly, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 20 January 2005, pp 96-116
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Summary
The wrongs of woman
In the period of the European Enlightenment, a modern feminist discourse emerged out of complimentary concerns with what the English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, named 'the wrongs of woman' and 'the rights of women'. There were earlier speculations on the possibility that women might constitute a class of people who suffer, and may demand rights, but there was no systematic attempt to theorise the position of women in Irish society - with a view to bringing about a change in that position - before the mid-eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century the wrongs of which women were conscious included unequal access to education, vulnerability to domestic violence and to sexual violence from family and strangers, limited rights of property and inheritance and exclusion from all levels of government and the judiciary. The groundswell of complaint about the wrongs suffered by women in Ireland tended to be particular and dispersed in this early period. Women and men who complained about specific aspects of women's lives did not couch those complaints within a thorough analysis of an Irish class system or social contract.
The absence of an overarching narrative immediately draws attention to perhaps the single greatest problem facing an historian of feminism in Ireland, which is the question as to whether the evolution of feminist discourses in Irish and in English constitute separate discourses and separate development. The large majority of Irish women were Irish-speaking. Literary sources from eighteenth-century Ireland suggest that there was some consciousness of a potential war between the sexes: men and women wanted different things from their lives and complained about one another as groups.
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