Project: History as "Fairy-ground": Scottish and Irish Female Voices and the Gothic Imagination (1780-1830)

2020-11-01 – 2022-10-31

Abstract

The project inscribes itself in Gothic criticism’s recognition of the temporal dynamic of Gothic narratives. It articulates the Gothic as an aesthetic that negotiates the temporal and ideological relation between past and present. The study examines how female authors from Scotland and Ireland stage the past in Gothic texts in the Romantic Period (1780-1830). In particular, it focuses on the emplotment and anachronisation of the praeternatural (ghosts, fairies, superstitions etc.) in Irish and Scottish Gothic as a means to negotiate the boundary between a premodern worldview and a newly-emerging modern society. This distorted way of dealing with history simultaneously disavows and preserves the premodern praeternatural through an uncanny resurrection of the elements that the modern order cannot take in. The resulting tension between modernising gestures and a return of a premodern past enables an interrogation of processes of ‘disenchantment’ and ‘secularisation’ in terms of identity building, projection and subterfuge. In focusing on the ways in which these texts rearticulate and reimagine the praeternatural, this project elucidates how female authors instrumentalise the imaginative practices of Gothic writing to negotiate the Scottish and Irish cultural past. By elaborating on female authors from Ireland and Scotland, this project engages with questions of canon-formation, regional inflections of the Gothic and the role of the female agent in the writing of history.