Forgotten fiction: Reconsidering the Gothic novel in eighteenth-century Ireland

Outlining the current critical neglect of late-eighteenth century Irish Gothic fiction, this article attributes such inattention to recent scholarship's useful but at times misleading generic distinctions and categorizations. Overlooked in the scholarly focus on the national and regional literary forms that developed in Ireland in the years surrounding the Anglo-Irish Union of 1801, early Irish Gothic fiction is also disregarded because of its pointed departure from prevailing definitions of the British Gothic novel. Reconsideration of key early Irish Gothic texts reveals these vital differences and, in so doing, forces us also to rethink our understanding of the British Gothic novel.