Irish Gothic - Gothic in Contemporary Culture · The Irish Devilfish, The Irish Vampire, ... Song...
Transcript of Irish Gothic - Gothic in Contemporary Culture · The Irish Devilfish, The Irish Vampire, ... Song...
Cartoons for Punch
The Irish Devilfish, The Irish Vampire, the Irish Frankenstein (Sir John Tenniel)
“I shall have to write some accounts which will seem to the
reader either utterly impossible, or quite ridiculous. But with
the help of God I will insert nothing in my book the truth of
which I have not elicited with the greatest diligence whether
from my own firm belief or the authentic testimony of the most
trustworthy men.”
(Giraldus Cambrensis)
“Irish culture is sedimentary. By this I mean that things don’t get obliterated,
they get buried. They are covered with a new layer of history but they are
still down there, like bodies preserved in bogs. They surface in new forms,
like holy wells and holy mountains as places of Christian pilgrimage. Or they
emerge into wholly new contexts, like Fionn Mac Cumhaill waking from his
slumbers to find himself in two avant-garde 20th-century novels, James
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds . What
Sigmund Freud called “the return of the repressed” is the very stuff of Irish
art. It is haunted by ghosts and revenants. Nothing is ever really dead”
(Fintan O’Toole)