Abstract

This essay provides a survey of the recent widening of Anglo-Irish Gothic to include works written in the second half of the eighteenth century. It then analyses the development of the genre as a response to the political and social conditions in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A response to political turmoil and modernisation, the Gothic expresses anxieties and fears related to the political, religious and sexual spheres. The fear of subversion and terror aroused by the French Revolution was amplified by the 1798 Irish rebellion, which inexorably led to the Union. This essay examines how the Anglo-Irish Gothic writing of the period negotiated and managed to govern the most topical coeval issues: the Union, terror and violence, as well as an increasingly felt decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.