Three nineteenth-century Irish novelists, their Gothic myth, and national literature: Charles Robert Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker

This study focuses on Irish Gothic literature as a distinct genre separate from English Gothic literature by using criteria established by William Butler Yeats regarding what constituted Irish literature---originality, Irish subject, Irish personal and national identity, and passion---and identifying the vampire as an archetype with Irish characteristics. This dissertation is organized chronologically to track the development of Irish Gothic and the vampire. It begins by looking at Charles Robert Maturin's life and his novel Melmoth the Wanderer in relation to Yeats's definition of an Irish literature, the vampire myth, and the initiation of Irish Gothic. This method of analysis continues in the next chapter, devoted to Sheridan Le Fanu and two texts used as representatives of his work, "Carmilla" and Uncle Silas. The fourth chapter ties the influence of Maturin and Le Fanu to Yeats's criteria and Bram Stoker's novel Dracula .; This work concludes by correlating the evolution of Irish Gothic literature and the vampire to the development of an Irish national as well as a personal identities of the authors. The one hundred years of Irish history represented by the three writers illustrates the complex struggle for self-definition that Anglo-Irish writers engaged in while Ireland consciously sought to create a national literature. Each writer's quest met with its own challenges due to the place, time, and experiences that each encountered, influencing the perceived level of success that each felt in private and public life. Maturin, Le Fanu, and Stoker all turned to writing with the practical expectations of financial success and literary fame, but their work also indicates a search for identity. The literary results were the Irish Gothic genre and the telling character of the Irish vampire that emerged from it.