I. The socio-political context
- Fight for Irish independence:
Daniel O'Connell and the Catholic Association,
The Young Ireland Movement - The Great Famine of 1847-1851
- The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)
- The Home Rule Association and Charles Stewart Parnell
II. Trends and themes in the prose of the modern period
The condition of Ireland writings are writings whose concern was the political, social and cultural situation of Ireland, the Young Ireland Movement and the Great Famine and its aftermath.
- William Carleton: Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry and The Black Prophet
The regional novel is a literary creation whose main concern was a particular area and the people who inhabit such particular areas.
- Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent
The big house theme is associated with the representation of the big houses of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and reflects the uncertainties and worries of the Protestant landowning class in their decline during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the context of the process of emancipation of the Irish people.
- Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent
- Somerville and Ross: The Real Charlotte
The Irish gothic is placed under the influence of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Walter Scott. Irish Gothic fiction is marked by less sensationalism, the constant avoidance of dealing with anxieties, lunatic asylums or marital cruelty and its pronounced lack of interest in the medieval period. Such fiction is more attached to history and politics.
- Sheridan Le Fanu: In a Glass Darkly
- Bram Stoker: Dracula
III. Representatives and works
1. Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent (1800)
- the first regional novel in English narrating about the degradation and ruin of an Anglo-Irish Protestant family of landowners seen across four generations.
- the narrator is an old steward, Thady Quirk, an unreliable narrator whose role is to witness and not participate and then to report. He uses a sort of 'vernacular idiom' of the Hiberno-English kind, another characteristic that gives the novel its regional character.
2. William Carleton
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830-1833)
- a work about Ireland’s political, economic and religious issues at local level
- one of the most authentic and vivid accounts of the life of Ireland’s poor rural people narrated with humour and full of sympathy and understanding
The Black Prophet: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1846-1847)
- a novel that Carleton wrote under the influence of the Great Famine of 1845 in which he attacks various groups – money-lenders, extortionists, landlords, middlemen and government for having brought the country to the disaster of 1845-1850.
3. Somerville and Ross
The Real Carlotte (1894)
- deals with the issues of social decline of the aristocracy and moves across a broad social spectrum of Irish society from rural peasants to lower-middle-class Dubliners.
- it lines up with the tradition of the big house Ascendancy novel and treats ‘the classic theme of class and character'.
Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. (1899) and its sequels: Further Experiences of an Irish R. M. (1908) and In Mr Knox’s Country (1915) – collected in 1956 under the title The Irsh R. M.
- a collection of hilarious tales having Major Sinclair Yeates (the R. M – i.e. Resident Magistrate – of the title) at their centre and as their narrator.
- he is a comic stereotype of the congenial and well-meaning Englishman who believes he has understood the way of life of the Irish natives but who often finds himself helpless and lost in the maze of Irish local habits.
4. Sheridan Le Fanu: In a Glass Darkly (1872)
- a collection of five stories presented as case histories from the papers of a Dr. Martin Hesselius who investigates different manifestations of mental disorders.
- each story is told by an unbiased narrator, the former medical secretary to Dr Hesselius, whose task is to edit the late doctor’s work left to him as a collection of papers he has to arrange, index and bind.
- the secretary reproduces ‘with slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names’ the letters of Dr Hesselius addressed to his friend, the Professor Van Loo of Leyden.
- a triple filter of verisimitude: (i) the medical facts are narrated by the doctor in letters addressed to his friend, (ii) reproduced then by the secretary and finally (iii) offered as such to the reader by the writer.
'Carmilla'
- a vampire story which turns round Laura and her dealings with the vampire Carmilla and her avatars (Mircalla and Millarca).
- it sets the standard for Gothic vampire literature – though vampire stories (such as Dracula) lean more towards horror than Gothic or romantic in style of writing.
5. Bram Stoker: Dracula
- the connection with the Romanian prince Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) and the derivation the name 'Dracula' -- the original name was 'The Un-Dead'.
- the association with the vampire literature in the European tradition: John Polidori in The Vampyre (1819), with his vampire story inspired by elements of Lord Byron‘s vampire poem, ‘The Giaour‘ (1813).
- Dracula is an epistolary novel, narrated by multiple voices with different viewpoints -- written as a collection of diary entries and personal documents – Jonathan’s journal of his trip to Transylvania, Mina’s diary, Seward’s recorded journal – telegrams, and letters from the characters, as well as fictional clippings from the Whitby and London newspapers.
- Dracula in films: the most famous screen adaptations of Stoker’s Dracula: Nosferatu (1922, a silent film directed by F. W. Murnau), Dracula (1931, directed by Tod Browning), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992, directed by Francis Ford Coppola).
IV. Videos
Nosferatu (1922)
From Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
