Manchester University Press Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction

Poignantly describing himself as 'a disappointed author' in his own lifetime, Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1820) acutely foresaw the cultural amnesia into which he would fall after his death in 1824. Remembered today, if at all, for his Gothic masterpiece, 'Melmoth the Wanderer' (1820), Maturin has largely fallen by the wayside in critical attention to Irish Romantic literature. The most complete and up-to-date reading of Maturin and his novels available today, this book reinstates Maturin as a key figure in the development of Irish Romantic fiction by demonstrating the manner in which his six novels dramatically underscore the haunted and haunting nature of Irish literary production in the wake of Anglo-Irish Union (1801). Working from Jacques Derrida's influential theory on ghosts, this study counters the traditional understanding of early-nineteenth century Irish fiction as constituted by national and regional literary forms comprised of totalizing narratives of reconciliation and closure. Instead, tracing the continued emergence of an atavistic past - cultural, social, and political - in the novels of Maturin and his contemporaries, this study reveals the Gothic mode's persistent spectral influence in Ireland throughout the Romantic period and, correspondingly, proposes a new paradigm by which to understand Irish Romantic fiction. At the same time, this study illustrates Maturin's sustained literary influence on contemporary and more modern authors in Ireland and abroad, exhorting renewed attention from academics and enthusiasts alike, to an author all but forgotten, despite his central influence on literature from the early-nineteenth century to today, for far too long. Review 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. From the Inside Flap A self-described disappointed Author, Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) has been largely relegated to the margins of literary history since his death in 1824. Yet, as this study demonstrates, he exerted a fundamental influence on the development of Irish fiction in the early nineteenth century. In particular, his novels dramatically underscore the continuing presence and deployment of the Gothic mode in Romantic Ireland an influence now frequently overlooked in critical attention to the national and regional forms popularized in Ireland in the wake of Anglo-Irish Union (1801). Working from Jacques Derridas influential theory on ghosts, this study positions Maturin as the cornerstone on which to build a new paradigm of Irish Romantic fiction, one which accounts for the spectral traces of the past cultural, social, and political evident in early-nineteenth century Irish fiction. As it does so, it calls for renewed critical and popular attention to an author who himself continues spectrally to emerge in the works of his literary successors. From the Back Cover A self-described "disappointed Author", Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) has been largely relegated to the margins of literary history since his death in 1824. Yet, as this study demonstrates, he exerted a fundamental influence on the development of Iris