J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Commentary
The Belfast News Letter (25 April 1845), Literary Notice: This is one of the best novels we have read for a lengthened period. The tale is exceedingly interesting; and it is written with unusual power amnd originality. The characters are all admirably conceived and sustained; tdhwe many and varied incidents are vividly depicted; and like this April [462] weather of sunshine and shade, the captivating chapters of each volume abound in bright flashes of genuine humour, and thrilling passages of the most affecting pathos. In addition to the sterling merit, the work is truly Irish. It altogether, as its title indicates, refers to our native land; its gifted author, we believe, is a countryman; so are its spirited and enterprising publishers; and sure we are, that wherever it may be circulated, it will bear no mean comparison with the most popular Romances of the present day. / The story relates to an early period in the last century. Its hero, Edmond OConnor, is represented as the son of one of the leading followers of James II, whose property has been entirely sacrificed in the cause of that unfortunate Monarch; and the heroine, all beautiful and good, is said to have been the daughter of an old impoverished, and unprincipled knight, Sir Richard Ashwoode. Between Edmond OConnor, and the gentle Mary Ashwoode, there had from childhood existed a warm attachment; but to their union, Sir Richard and his only son, a very profligate character, also, were most bitterly opposed. The base means they adopted to disunite the fond and faithful couple; the instruments they employed to execute their villainous purposes; the gambling associates of young Ashwoode, and his fatal connection with them; the many affecting trials of Mary Ashwoode; her ignorance of her brothers treachery, and horrible conduct towards her, while she confided so much to his love and direction; the courtships of the amorous Larry OToole; the singular generosity and kindliness of the warm-hearted Mr. Audley, Edmond OConnors benefactor; the villainy of the ruffians Blarden and Chancey; and the mournful closing scenes of the tale - the execution of Henry Ashwoode, the death of his sister, the frantic grief, the depth, the wildness, the desolation, of the bereaved Edmond OConnors woe, are most graphically and ably delineated. (p.4; quoted in Jan Jedrzejewski, ed., The Cock and Anchor [by] Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 2000, Appendix III, pp.462-63.) [ top ]
[ top ] The Newry Examiner and Louth Advertiser (14 May 1845), p.2: This is a romance of the beginning of the eighteenth century, in which the writer portrays a scene of fashionable dissipation, the reality of which is, alas! but too easily found in our own day. There are matters broached in the pages of this novel which, if not touched with the hand of a tyro, might have been turned to a good account. The writer is evidently a man of taste, but we do not think of matured judgment. His descriptive manner is excellent, but the plot is very imperfect. / In the first volume we are introduced to a level of the profligate Wharnton [sic!], then Viceroy of this country: there we meet with the immortal Swift - the unfretted monument of Irish genius; there we are made acquainted with his person and his undying satire, both of which are in a moment snatched off the stage of this novel, and the reader is doomed never again to see his illustrious name within its pages. For what purposes he was introduced by the author we are at a loss to divine. In the hands of a skilful writer, and with such a character as Swift, what a splendid opportunity was afforded for laying bare the villainy and the vice of that sink of iniquity, Dublin Castle, in which, a century ago, the lives and liberty of the Irish people were articles of merchandise. / The plot is not above the common kind - a young handsome fellow in love with (of course) a beautiful, engaging young maiden - an obstinate [476] and opposing father - the love affair carried on clandestinely - the whole exploded - the suitor ordered most unceremoniously to keep the back seam of his stocking towards Morley Court, the residence of the young Hebe. Deception is then practised on the parted lovers to make them hate, instead of love each other. In this conspiracy there is given, painted with no delicate hand, a picture of aristocratic depravity. - Love of money in but too many instances estranges the heart of its votaries from those endearing and consanguine ties which should bind the heart of father to child. Who leagued against the happiness of Mary - the gentle Mary Ashwood? Her father and brother, both of whom resolved to sell their victim to an old dotard fool with money and a title, that their libertine extravagance might still be indulged in. But young ladies, when placed in such situations, are (there is no accounting for it) perversely obstinate in refusing the choice of a wise, kind, loving father; and Mary Ashwood was no paragon of dutiful paternal obedience. She refused her fathers choice, and for very spite her father died. Her brother, a gambler, contracted such debts as totally embarrassed him. He too became the victim of a conspiracy in which he was netted, and cajoled by a scheming lawyer to assist in forging a bill for the amount of the debt. The bill was drawn on his most inveterate enemy, one Nick Blarden, who would have descended on a visit to his subterraneous namesake for revenge on the ill-fated Henry Ashwood. From his conferree, the lawyer, Blarden, got the bond in his possession - then for his revenge. His conditions were the possession of the unfortunate Mary her brother consented to the terms - she refused - the house became a garrison of infamous brutality, from which the young lady escaped in time to save her life and virtue. Hell could not have created greater rage than Blardens when he found that his prize was gone. He seized on her brother still in his power - cast him into gaol - prosecuted him for the forgery: it is enough to say that he was convicted and hanged; and in a short time after poor Mary died of a broken heart. In all this there is nothing above the common routine of novel making; but there is one scene in the book to which the reader is introduced - it is a conference of the friends of the house of Stuart, held in an old house in the Royal Park. Here seated in solemn conclave are men - the flower of the land whose fathers had staked their all on the destinies of that faithless monarch, yet their sons were as willing to again venture for the reinstatement of his fallen house. Here again we are at a loss to discover what the author meant to be at when he wrote this chapter, which appears to be entirely dislocated from the rest of the book. We cannot form the most distant idea, unless it was for the purpose of shewing off his own anti-Irish, anti-Catholic spirit. In this chapter a Catholic priest is made to thirst after the blood of his fellow-man - that man (for connexions sake in the tale) is made to be none other than Mary Ashwoods lover, Edmond OConnor, who was caught straying in the vicinity of the house. This is almost preposterous - think of it - a minister of Christ councilling an assembly of conspirators to sacrifice an innocent man. Horrible! It is a badly framed fiction, which would scarce be swallowed by the Soupers of Kerry. (Quoted in Jan Jedrzejewski, ed., The Cock and Anchor [by] Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 2000, Appendix III, pp.476-78.) [ top ]
Samuel Carter Hall: I knew the brothers Joseph and Williarn Le Fanu when they were youths at Castell Connell, on the Shannon ; both became famous - one as an author, the other as a civil engineer [...] They were my guides throughout the beautiful district around Castle Connell and I found them full of anecdote and rich in antiquarian lore, with thorough knowledge of Irish peculiarities. They aided us largely in the preparation of my book, Ireland: its scenery and character, Quoted in S. M. Ellis, Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others, NY: Books for Libraries 1968, p.154; cited in Gaïd Girard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Une écriture fantastique, Honoré Champion 2005, p.81, n.) [ top ] Elizabeth Bowen: The hermetic solitude and the autocracy of the great country house, the demonic power of the family myth, fatalism, feudalism, and the ascendancy outlook are accepted facts of life for the race of hybrids from which Le Fanu sprang. (Collected Impressions, London: Longman 1950, pp. 3-4; quoted in Eulalia Pinero-Gil [essay in], That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature, ed. Bruce Stewart [Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998; see also in Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010, p.120, under Bowen > Commentary - as supra.]
[ top ] Nelson Browne, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (London: Arthur Barker 1951): Mrs. Radcliffe is the progenitrix of everything in [Le Fanu] that may be termed romantic - his gloomy heroes, his intrepid heroines in perpetual flight from ruthless persecutors, his chivalrous conception of honour, his ancient houses and castles falling into ruin, his fondness for showing Nature in her sombre and threatening moods. (Quoted in David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman 1980), p.231, and cited in Margarita G. Bon, Seen Through Her Eyes: Point of View in Uncle Silas, in paper in That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature: Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.) [ top ] V. S. Pritchett: The Living Novel [1946] (London: Chatto and Windus 1954): ‘What he did was to bring an Irish lucidity and imagination to the turgid German flow. Le Fanus ghosts are what I take to be the most disquieting of all: the ghosts that can be justified, blobs of the unconscious that have floated up to the surface of the mind, and which are not irresponsible and perambulatory figments of family, moaing and claking about in fancy dress [...]. It is we who are the ghosts. Those are our own steps which follow us, it is our heavy body which we hear falling in the attic above. We haunt ourselves. (p.96; quoted in Gaïd Girard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Une écriture fantastique, Paris: Honoré Champion 2005, p.15.)
W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford 1980; rep. edn. Dublin: Lilliput 1991; rev. edn. Lilliput 1996), Do. [4th edn.] (Sutton: Far Thrupp 1997), 324pp.; b. 28 Aug., Dominick St., Dublin; son of Thomas Le Fanu, a Church of Ireland clergyman and grand-nephew of R. B. Sheridan on his mothers side, and therefore a cousin of Lord Dufferin with whom he corresponded, and Caroline Norton; his m. was Emma, dg. of William Dobbin, Cork-born clergyman, prebendary of S. Michans, and confessor to the Sheares brothers in 1798, and also present at the execution of Emmet; related to Ruthyns, and Aylmers; family established in professional and ecclesiastical careers in Dublin, his paternal gf. being a wine merchant; spent childhood in Royal Hibernian Military School, Phoenix Park, where his father was chaplain, 1815; absentee rector of Ardhageehy, Co. Cork, 1817; appt. to living in Abingdon, Co. Limerick (nr. Murroe), 1823 at date of Stradbroke evictions, but remained three years absentee until appt. Dean of Emly in 1826, when he moved to the rectory of Abington in March, neighboured by the Catholic priest Thomas OBrien Costello; Abington contains Le Fanu graves; cites list of Dean Le Fanus collection in Catalogue of the Library of the Very Rev. Thomas P. Le Fanu in Royal Irish Academy; incls. Mrs. Radcliffe; Thomas De Quincey; a 1527 Boccaccion ed. and 1st edn. of Poems of John Donne; Sheridans Pronouncing Dictionary and Moores Lifeof Sheridan; George Colmans Terence, and a vol. entitled Scripture Revelations concerning the Future State; succeeded John Jebb at Emly; tithe of £1,179 in 1823; death of Elizabeth Bonne Le Fanu, sis. of Thomas, in Bath, 25 July 1818; faction fights in Abington district; encounters the yella horse, summer 1838; presents his national ballad Seamus OBrien at meeting of refounded Hist., April. 1839; cousin Frances experiences depressive crisis; McCormack identifies Spalatro as a tale by Le Fanu (so noted in diary of Chas. Lever, Mar.-April.1843, now in Pierpont Morgan Library, NY) and interprets its dual incidents of incest and vampirism; notes correspondence with father about Williams supposed ambition for the church instead of engineering. [ top ] W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland [rev. edn.] (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1991): He assumes importance and influence late in life when he found in sensational fiction a means ot describe the extraordinary quality of his life, its urbanity and its closeness to violence. Essentially the common feature of his experience and of his fictional world is the idea of a society based on non-social assumptions, an experience outwardly social but really isolated and dangerously interior. Victorian Ireland is fascinating and relatively unknown, its daily routine a neglected part of the past which has moulded Yeats, Shaw, Parnell, and other distinctively modern figures. Its larger value as seen in Le Fanus career can only be appreciated if we are prepared to make the connection between his failure to evolve a viable political stance in Ireland and his experiments in English sensationalism. Normal vision has its own censoring devices, and two sets of filters must be laid aside; one which excludes middle-class Orangeism of the 1840 as an historical irrelevance, and the other which dismisses sensational fiction as pulp. [... &c.] (p.8.); Shamus OBrien was in part a symbol of disenchantment with the alliance between an ascendancy (or sections of it) in Ireland and a government in England. The rebels pride and isolatioin are authentic. But Shamus is a peasant, one of the ruffian mob, and so his celebreation is necessarily undercut by mimicry and sentimental evasion. (ibid., p.53.)
[ top ] J. W. McCormack, Introduction to In A Glass Darkly (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990), pp.vii-xvii: [...] It is a collection rigorously organised in its very appearance of inconsistency and decentredness. Location proliferates - England, Ireland, France, and Austria, with Germany and Hungary implicated. Le Fanus fiction does not create a unified landscape, any rounded solid world either British or Irish, urban or rural; instead it spins elliptically on a trajectory which demolishes the notion of a controlling centre. Nor does it project an orderly or stratified hierarchy, either of class or value. Thus, the displacements of Le Fanus fiction are only part of its comprehensive rejection of all notions of fixed centrality, reliable identity, and social stability. / Action ranges wide but not without symmetry. The immobilised consciousness of young Beckett in The Room in the Dragon Volant should be read as the counterpart of a lascivious and protean immortality in Carmilla. Sexuality doubles up for religion - but thats hardly rare. What is more curious is that the narrator of Carmilla addresses herself to a woman (a town lady like you) while we are of ficially led to believe that Martin Hesselius is her correspondent. At the structural or narrative level this reproduction of transferred gender (what if a boyish lover had found his way into the house ...?) echoes the narrated substance of the tale. But whether it echoes by way of confirmation or mockery is less clear. Boyish still implies the lovers femaleness even as it insinuates the word boy. / And verbal nuance is pervasive.
[ top ] James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room, The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse UP/Gill & Macmillan 1983), Le Fanu contributed a ballad on Fitzgerald to the Dublin University Magazine in 1839, That day that traitors sould him and inimies bought him, / The day that the red gold and red blood was paid - / Then the green turned pale and thrembled like the dead leaves in Autumn, / And the heart an hope iv Ireland in the could grave was laid. Cahalan notes le Fanus mothers great admiration of Lord Edward, adding that she had even stolen his sword from the officer who captured him. [71] The more accurate version in his brothers book, Seventy Years of Irish Life, is that she held the dagger with which he stabbed Capt. Ryan.
[ top ] Jean Lozes, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: The Prince of the Invisible, in Patrick Rafroidi & Terence Brown, eds., The Irish Short Story (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1979), pp.98-99: The mystery of the rational, or the irrational, is in fact the mystery of guilt. The pangs that a guilty conscience has to endure, the various levels of consciousness of guilt one may uncover if one has the will to do so, the inevitable retribution, the constant suggestion of the dual or even triple aspects in a mans psycheall these definitely suggest a new science, a new way of studying the human personality. Le Fanu undeniable sensed the birth of psychoanalysis. (Cited in Thomas Loe, paper in That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature: Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.)
Joseph Spence, The Great Angelic Sin: The Faust Legend in Irish Literature, 1820-1900, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), pp.47-58, espec. pp.53ff: The fate of the Anglo-Irish, symbolised by the victims inertia is not hard to see in The Familiar, but there are Irish resonances in the other stories too, for they reveal the insecurity of the Protestant Irishman in the wake of disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869), and with the dawning of the suspicion that Westminster, which had initially sanctioned it, might not be able to uphold the Williamite settlement after 1870, in the face of the Land League and the Home Rule movement (p.53.); Carmilla pleads sensually for Laura to join in her (?Anglo-Irish) life-in-death: ... No sacrifice without blood. (p.54.) [ top ] Robert Tracy, reviewing new editions of J. S. Le Fanu, The Cock and Anchor, 3 vols; The House by the Churchyard and The Purcell Papers along with William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 38 No. 3 (Dec. 1983), pp.354-57, writes: young hero in Cock and Anchor is dispossessed by Williamite Wars [i.e., a Catholic], and scorned by heroines family; no resolution is found; nationalist and Unionist as Le Fanu projects those terms back into the past from his own day, perish alike; the Ascendancy can neither compromise nor even sustain itself - Le Fanus warning to his own contemporaries; Purcell papers comprise the 12 pieces written for Dublin University Magazine from 1838 to 1840 with another from 1850.
Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (1995), pp.178-79: A trend toward allegorical or eqivocal writing may indeed develop from several factors in the Anglo-Irish artists situate. We can agree that one of these might be a sense of social guit, which a writer cannot opening acknowledge without appearing as a traitor to her class, and which therefore must be smuggled in, as it wre into express. We saw this form of indirection in Irish Gothic, particualy in Le Fanus ghost stories and mysteries. Le Fanu also supplied the formula of its operation. Mystery - for mystery read allegory - is the shadow of guilt.Something else reinforcing the AI writers turn towards equivocal or veiled writing may be her or his despair, after Unioin, of remaining in or joining the mainstream of English writing. To put it brutally, it was no longer socially rewarding to go to London and make sounds (and gestures) like an English man.To stay at home and do that was not rewarding [178] either. Hence the incentive to discover another way of writing, perhaps one that drew form very old traditions indeed of Irish indirectness, reticence, and implicitness in speaking, in manners, and in mien. The formula for this might be, to say what one means one says what one does not mean. [See also foregoing comments on Mccormack; and note that Moynahan gives no source for the sentence from Le Fanu.] [ top ] Jan Jedrzejewski, Introduction, The Cock and Anchor (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 2000): [...] the young lovers [Edmond OConnor and Mary Ashwoode] are eventually buried side by side, and a newly-forged friendship between their surrogate fathers offers a glimmer of hope that the faultline between the two traditions [i.e., Catholic and Protestant] might not be as unbreachable as one would initially be justified in supposing. / This is precisely where The Cock and Anchor becomes a contribution to the mid-nineteenth-century debate about Irishness: it is a call for moderate unionists, particularly those of the conservative persuasion (Oliver French, significantly, is a Tory), and for moderate nationalists - in other words, for those grouped around The [xv] Dublin University Review on the one hand, and for those associated with the Young Ireland movement on the other - to come together and join forces in the search for a new Ireland, one in which the future Mary Ashwoodes and Edmond OConnors would no longer face the barriers of prejudice and sectarianism. The two political grouping can try to reconcile at least some of their differences and work together because they both face the same opposition: on the one hand, the Whig establishment (represented in the novel by the Earl of Wharton), corrupt and materialistic, and interested first of all in the promotion of their own interests at Westminster rather than in recognising the actual needs and problems of Ireland, and, on the other hand, the radical OConnellite nationalists (represented by OHanlons ruthless fellow-conspirators gather at Finiskea House), blinded by their prejudices, religious and/or ideological, for the sake of political expediency. The task is difficult, and there is no guarantee of success - Mary and Edmond do not get united this side of the grave after all - but the possibilities are there, and therefore worth exploring. [Cont.]
[ top ] Victor Sage, ‘Irish Gothic: C. R. Maturin and J. S. Le Fanu', in A Companion to the Gothic , ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell 2000): ‘Loyal, indoctrinated Maud [in Uncle Silas], who takes her charge so seriously and yet displays the detached curiosity of the original fairy tale, in itself the heritage of Eve, cannot believe her uncle is evil; so even when the signs are staring her in the face that he intends to destroy her, she honourably refuses to believe it of her kinsman, putting herself in mor[t]al danger. (p.91; quoted in Susan Parlour, UUC MA Diss., 2008.) [ top ] Gaïd Girard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Une écriture fantastique (Honoré Champion 2005), Introduction: [...] Comme tout Irlandais, Le Fanu baigne dans une culture plus attentive quune autre aux pouvoirs de limaginaire et à la magie du verbe, toujours proche dun passé pourtant mythique. Bien avant le réveil celtique de la fin du XIX siècle, il nétait pas rare que les membres de lAscendancy sintéressent à la culture gaëlique. Les lettrés de lépoque, quils soient protestants ou catholiques, cherchaient les moyens adéquats pour transférer à lécrit un récit conté oralement, comme en témoignent de nombreux articles du DUM [Dublin University Magazine]. William Trevor, et bien dautres avant lui, ont vu dans ce passage à lécrit dune tradition orale fortement ancrée dans la culture irlandaise lacte de naissance de la nouvelle irlandaise. Frank OConnor avait été beaucoup plus précis et universel à la fois en voyant dans la nouvelle une forme dexpression privilégiée de groupes culturels dominés [vide n., submerged population groups]. Il est incontestable que Le Fanu excelle dans la forme courte. / Ainsi, les premiers chapitres de cet ouvrage proposeront une archéologie de Fécriture fantastique de Le Fanu, consacrée aux textes directement inspirés de la culture orale irlandaise et de leur inscription dans Histoire; nombreux sont en effet les récits de Le Fanu, très rarement commentés, qui utilisent et retravaillent des motifs 1égendaires connus. En revanche, linfluence de lesthétique du. roman gothique sur ses écrits à toujours été abondamment signa1ée, à tel point quil à été quelquefois présenté comme un late Gothic writer, dont Uncle Silas offrirait au genre lun de ses plus tardifs fleurons. Le Fanu nest cependant ni Ann Radcliffe ni même Maturin; comme nous le montrerons, il écrit trop longtemps apré ses illustres aînés pour ne pas utiliser le genre gothique de manière réflexive et distanciée. De plus, il est Irlandais alors que le genre est éminemment anglais. Dune autre manière que pour le conte irlandais, cest à nouveau. de ré-écriture quil sagit ici. / On ne finit pas dailleurs encore au XXIe siècle de découvrir laptitude du genre gothique à se moderniser et à plaire à des lecteurs pourtant revenus de tout. Après avoir montré combien le genre pouvait avoir été subversif, en particulier au XVIII siècle [n.: Cest le travail enterpris par les études féministes principalment], les études génériques ont dû reconnaître que le genre est plus protéiforme quil ny paraissait et que les frontières entre gothique, sensationnel et roman dénigme deviennent très poreuses au XIXe siècle. À lère de la grande peur victorienne de la contamination, cette dernière est manifestement à loeuvre dans la production romanesque britannique et européenne; nous verrons que Le Fanu nest pas en reste, quoique de façon détournée, lui qui se refuse dans les quelques textes théoriques et essais littéraires quon lui connaîit à se voir affubler de létiquette dauteur à sensation. / Dans cette distance maintenue avec le sensationnalisme en vogue an milieu du siècle, on trouve le souci constant chez Le Fanu de ne pas grossir les effets impunément; le grotesque quil pratique à loccasion sarticule toujours sur une vision étrange, sinon terrifiée, de lhomme et de ses rapports au monde. Dans ses textes les plus audacieux, il ne se contente pas de réutiliser des codes répertoriés pour écrire les affres dune conscience hantée, bien quil sache utiliser à lextreme les peurs et les terreurs des héroines gothiques persécutées, mais il y intègre le modèle de la confession calviniste, du journal intime écrit sous loeil implacable de Dieu pour exprimer les tourments les plus douloureux de la psyché humaine. / Sans quune opposition absolument étanche soit opérante entre souffrances mentales masculines et féminines dans les écrits de Le Fanu, il est néanmoins frappant de constater que les manifestations des troubles de la psyché chez ses personnages épousent une division sexuelle qui recoupe le discours victorien sur les maladies mentales: aux femmes les symptémes hystériques théorisés par les épigones dune tradition médicale héritée du mesmérisme, aux hommes les tourments des délires de persécution menant souvent an suicide, plus proches des théosophies swedenborgiennes. Dans les deux cas, qui se chevauchent dans certains textes, attestant ainsi de la grande labilité de son écriture, Le Fanu fait [ètrer] son lecteur au plus près des abîmes de lâme humaine et de la dépossession de soi-mème, anticipant dans un effet troublant de boucle proleptique le texte de Freud sur []linquiétante étrangeté. Les structures de répétition, les dénis et les détours sans cesse à joeuvre dans ses textes, à tous les niveaux de la construction fictionnelle, fondent une véritable poétique du cauchemar [vide Gwenhael Ponnau, La Folie dans la littèrature fantastique, 1987, p.271]; fantasme et vision hallucinée sy entremélent au coeur dune esthétique exigeante, qui privilégie le regard et la suspension du temps, qui construit loeuvre dart sur les éclats dun réel qui se dérobe. / Cest la construction de cette esthétique que cet ouvrage cherche à mettre au jour au moyen dune déambulation attentive au coeur des textes de Sheridan Le Fanu marqués par létrange. Cest seulement par lanalyse du cristal [vide, Oscar Wilde: Art is not a mirror but a crystal ...] de lécriture que lon pourra rendre compte de la fascination que Le Fanu à exercée sur des écrivains aussi différents que Henry James et Julio Cortàzar. II na pas été preté suffisamment attention jusquici à cette écriture singulière et cest lambition de cet ouvrage que de faire briller dun sombre éclat les multiples facettes dune poétique de linquiétude à la fois lucide et hantée. [End intro.] [ top ] Margaret Kelleher, Prose Writing and Drama in English; 1830-1890 [...], in Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. Kelleher & Philip OLeary (Cambridge UP 2006), Vol. 1: [...] Le Fanus first novels were historical: The Cock and Anchor, being a Chronicle of Old Dublin City (1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh OBrien: A Tale of the Wars of King James (1847), the latter influenced by John Banims Boyne Water (1826). In The Cock and Anchor, early eighteenth-century Dublin is vividly depicted as the capital of a rebellious and semi-barbarous country - haunted by hungry adventurers, who had lost everything in the revolutionary wars. Early chapters give voice to the claims of the Catholic dispossessed, mercenaries and beggars abroad, and landless at home, against a perjured, corrupt, and robbing ascendancy, a warning and a wonder to all after times but the novel ultimately reads as a cautionary tale for the present, directed towards a mid-nineteenth-century aristocratic class then experiencing a sharp decline in its political power. [Cont.]
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