The Gothicization of Irish Folklore

Abstract

Drawing attention to their shared association with superstition, transgression of rationality, fascination with the supernatural, and repet- itive recourse to familiar tropes and formulaic narrative conventions, critics have repeatedly argued that folklore is a significant source for Gothic tropes and themes. Jason Marc Harris, for example, claims: ‘the Gothic and other literary traditions of fantasy and the fantastic have extended and stylized motifs and metaphysics that were long- standing in folklore to begin with’.¹ Attributing the virtual absence of ghosts and phantoms in early-eighteenth-century literature to the dom- inance of the supremely rational worldview of the Augustans, David Punter argues: ‘But they started to reappear with the Gothic revival, occurring often in the old ballads and from there they moved into Gothic fiction’.² Elizabeth MacAndrew, meanwhile, points to the cre- ative encounter between individual imagination and communal lore presented in Gothic fiction, which ‘gives form to amorphous fears and impulses [... ] using an amalgam of materials, some torn from the author’s own subconscious mind and some the stuff of myth, folklore, fairy tale, and romance’.³ From these critical perspectives, Gothic fic- tion feeds on older narrative forms, including folklore, which in turn inform and haunt a newer literary mode whose central preoccupations revolve around a contested power dynamic between past and present.