Introduction
According to the German literary historian Rein A. Zondergeld, fantastic literature tends, generally speaking, to dominate in countries where ‘boundaries are less firmly established, whether within the structural confines of the state, or with regard to the concomitant notion of your own identity [...]’. [1] In this connection Zondergeld mentions Belgium, Poland, and Ireland as countries exemplifying this trend, and he furthermore stresses the ‘virtually emancipatory’ potentials of such a cultural scenario. Another obvious example - apart from the countries mentioned by the German critic - would be the U.S., with its (historically speaking) wide open frontier(s) and its multi-ethnic “melting-pot” - but that is another story.

According to Zondergeld, the fantastic is, as a matter of fact, imbued with ‘the characteristics of the negative’ [i.e. it tends to offer an antithetical or negative vision of the world], ‘but nevertheless its effects are, in the last resort, emancipatory, because it is no longer satisfied with conventional representations of reality, but it is (on the contrary) on its way towards, or it has already reached, a more inclusive notion of reality ...’ (90) This world (i.e. the world of fantastic fiction) may be cold, but its cold is ‘the cold that is blowing into our faces, when we leave Plato’s cave behind and turn our backs on its shadows’ (91).

The fantastic certainly plays an immensely important role in Irish literature - the proceedings of a conference held in Monaco in 1998: “‘That Other World’: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts” (1998) illustrate this point on an impressively grand scale (taking up more than 700 pages).

In my article I shall focus on a number of examples of the Irish fantastic - from Sheridan Le Fanu to John Banville, i.e. from the middle of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries. Whereas Le Fanu’s fantastic narratives in many respects bear a striking resemblance to “classic” Gothic and/or fantastic fiction (Hoffmann, Poe, Henry James), Banville’s Faustian novel Mefisto (1986) has been categorized by Neil Cornwell in The Literary Fantastic (1990) as ‘somewhere close to the pure-fantastic sector in the postmodern spectrum’. [2] Le Fanu’s characters frequently struggle to maintain a rational world-view in the face of (apparently) supernatural events, but under the auspices of postmodernism, i.e. during the last decades of the twentieth century, well-established cultural boundaries by definition tend to break down: to a large extent explicitly or spectacularly supernatural and/or fantastic elements are, more or less wholeheartedly, simply absorbed by the structures of everyday life.

I shall take up fantastic narratives by such authors as Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde ( The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891), Elizabeth Bowen (“The Demon Lover”, 1941), Flann O’Brien (The Dalkey Archive, 1965), Samuel Beckett, and John Banville. Whereas Irish folklore and popular culture played a (relatively speaking) important role in Le Fanu’s fiction, we also notice how (international) literary movements like modernism and postmodernism make a considerable impact on twentieth-century versions of the Irish fantastic. In my paper I shall discuss these structural changes in connection with a general attempt to elucidate the texts in question in the light of precisely the historical, poetological and/or metahistorical assumptions mentioned above.

Classic Versions of the Irish Fantastic
As an example of mid-nineteenth-century fantastic fiction in Ireland one might choose Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic novella “Green Tea” (republished in 1872 in the collection of tales called In a Glass Darkly). According to Ann Cahill, as a story teller Sheridan Le Fanu sometimes borrowed narrative materials from Irish folklore, but ‘[a]lthough Le Fanu drew on folktales for the themes and plots of some of his stories, these were rewritten with different emphases and to fulfil different functions remote from those of traditional folk tales and intended rather to investigate the inner person, particularly in spiritual matters’. [3] In “Green Tea” the malicious, possibly infernal monkey that haunts the poor Mr. Jenkins (a country vicar) may or may not have something to do with the Swedish theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg’s ideas concerning the world of spirits (and his theory of “correspondences”, according to which animals do represent or embody various aspects of the human psyche or various spiritual entities ) . As a matter of fact, the first-person narrator (Dr. Hesselius) picks up a book in Mr. Jenkins’ study, where Swedenborg refers to ‘evil spirits’ that appear to the observer ‘in the shape of the beast (fera) which represents their particular lust and life, in aspect direful and atrocious’. [4] In this connection it is worth-while bearing in mind how important Swedenborgian thought was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where writers as different as Blake, Balzac, Emerson, and Baudelaire were under this theologian’s spell.

Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” also illustrates a point made by David Punter in his study The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the present day (1980): according to Punter quite a few examples of the Victorian Gothic (or fantastic, it might be added) move ‘in a world substantially composed of leisured bachelors’. [5] Even if we find certain references to the professional activities of the characters (Mr. Jennings, Dr. Hesselius, the first-person narrator of the frame-narrative, who is Dr. Hesselius’ ‘medical secretary’, Dr. Hesselius’ correspondent, ‘Professor van Loo of Leyden’), [61] they all seem to be ‘leisured bachelors’ - as a matter of fact, Dr. Martin Hesselius is explicitly portrayed as ‘a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term “‘easy circumstances”‘ (Le Fanu, 1).

What Le Fanu thematizes in “Green Tea”, however, is precisely the destructive and self-destructive character of this easygoing life-style. As it is pointed out by W.J. McCormack:

When the prologue to “Green Tea” informs us that the editor/narrator disqualified himself from surgical practice with ‘a very trifling scratch with a dissecting knife’ are we to read this as a foreshadowing of the Reverend Jennings’ cutting his throat in the story which immediately follows? Interpreters of a Lacanian disposition might see the editor’s trifling accident as an act of self-mutilation, symbolic castration perhaps, and certainly as damaging to the scribal capacity as to the incisive one [but] Instead of seeking to link up these mutually remote characters in some pattern of behaviour, perhaps attention should focus on the objects named - dissecting knife, razor, and so on. [7]

And if the medical secretary’s ability to write has also been impaired through such an act of (virtual) self-mutilation, to what extent can we then rely on the narrative presented to us by this first-person narrator/editor - even if Dr. Hesselius is turned into a kind of secondary narrator? If we take a look at the way Dr. Hesselius manipulates the case- story in question (ending up with Mr. Jennings’ suicide), we must be skeptical with regard to his position as an “authentic” informant, for in his ‘Conclusion’ Dr. Hesselius pays no special attention to his own failure to ‘cure’ Mr. Jenkins, dismissing the clergyman’s case as an example of ‘hereditary suicidal mania’, and he sums up his own would-be medical record as follows:

Poor Mr. Jennings I cannot call a patient of mine, for I had not even begun to treat his case, and he had not yet given me, I am convinced, his full and unreserved confidence. If the patient do not array himself on the side of the disease, his cure is certain. (34)

In this manner the patient is blamed instead of the doctor! The cure is “certain”, but unfortunately the patient died.

According to the critic Thomas Loe, the spectral monkey in “Green Tea” could very aptly be regarded as Mr. Jennings’ diabolical double or Doppelgânger : ‘What the monkey signifies is ambiguous and problematic, but it is clearly meant for readers to believe it is a type of counter to the “good” Rev Jennings’. [8] In this connection we must bear in mind that in Christian iconography the monkey is frequently portrayed as an emblem of sexual lasciviousness, as genius luxuriae . [9] In this perspective the monkey - whose incessant appearances and reappearances lead to Mr. Jenkins’ death by suicide - represents whatever Mr. Jenkins has tried to repress during his whole life (the id, his libido, etc.). But Dr. Hesselius’ attempt to rationalize events remains highly problematic, for the very appearance of the monkey remains for all that an inexplicable mystery -and so does its weird intrusiveness as well as the whole paranoid structure of this psychodrama, a psychodrama which cannot, as far as I can see, be explained solely on the basis of references to the natural code (which is precisely what Dr. Hesselius attempts to do in his “Conclusion”, entitled “A Word for Those Who Suffer”). [ 10]

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) supernaturalism is put into discourse in a much more explicit (and less ambivalent) manner than in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”. But at the same time one of the characters in Stoker’s novel bears a certain resemblance to Le Fanu’s expert on ‘Metaphysical Medicine’, [11] i.e. Dr. Hesselius, for the self-appointed leader of the band of vampire-hunters Dr. Van Helsing certainly reminds us in many respects of this precursor: ‘He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind ...’[ 12] Van Helsing and his helpers constitute a kind of brother horde (to use a Freudian term), attempting to kill - and in the end succeeding in killing - the terrifying father of the primal horde, i.e. the arch-vampire Dracula. Of course, these male characters could also be compared to David Punter’s ‘leisured bachelors’ (even if one of them, i.e. Jonathan Harker, does get married by and by); but what is more important is the position of the female characters within the plot (in “Green Tea” the only female agent portrayed by the narrator, Lady Mary, is certainly a marginal figure). In Dracula characters like Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker certainly play an important role in the plot, even if they tend to be victimized as prototypical femmes fragiles (with a capacity for turning into their own opposites, embodying contrapuntally the femme fatale, such as it happens to Lucy Westenra after she has become a vampire). And in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’s Guest’ (published posthumously in 1914) - ‘an hitherto unpublished episode from Dracula’ [13] - another femme fatale makes her appearance, when Jonathan Harker is on his way towards Transsylvania and seeks shelter during a snow storm in ‘the deep Doric doorway of [a] marble tomb’ (18): ‘1 ... saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier’; in the last moment, however, the protagonist is saved from this otherworldly temptress by ‘the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm’ (19) (a clear-cut example of supernatural aid, carried out this time precisely by Count Dracula, who needs Jonathan Harker in order to be able to carry out his subsequent meticulously planned, sinister, somewhat Bin Laden-like attack on the imperial centre of Western civilization itself, the English capital). The theme of the double - put-into-discourse in Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (cf. above) - plays a conspicuous role in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In Otto Rank’s well-known study of the Doppelgiinger in anthropology, fiction and film, The Double (1914, American edition 1971), the psychoanalyst offers a rather detailed reading of Wilde’s fin-de-siècle masterpiece. According to Rank,

[...] in Wilde’s novel it becomes, clear that fear and hate with respect to the double-self are closely connected with the narcissistic love for it and with the resistance of this love. The more Dorian despises his image, which is becoming old and ugly [i.e. in his stead], the more intensive does his self-love become: ‘The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. lie grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty [...]’ [14]

What has led to this impasse is, in the last resort, a compact with the Devil, where Dorian Gray attempts to transfer his own mortality - and the unavoidable biological ageing process - to a portrait of him painted by Basil Hallward (and for a long period of time succeeds in doing this): ‘If the picture could change, and I could always be what I am now [...]’[15] But ultimately the protagonist’s systematic attempt to aestheticize his personal life 100 per cent - with all its stakes in the air, as it were - provokes a kind of existential backlash, where the Law of the Father is re written under the auspices of a new fatality. In the last resort the death instinct triumphs, when Dorian Gray tries to ‘kill this monstrous soul-life’ (256), i.e. to stab the painting or his own double (a truly suicidal act on his part):

When [the servants] entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was. (257)

The subject has certainly ceased to coincide with itself!

Can this ending be interpreted in accordance with the narrative logic of the classic fantastic, where precisely Jt]he fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event’ (Todorov)?[16] Whereas Dr. Hesselius in “Green Tea” and even Mina Harker in Dracula to a large extent draw on a natural code and attempt to rationalize apparently supernatural events, it is much more difficult to carry out such a hermeneutical operation vis-a- vis The Picture of Dorian Gray. Could Dorian Gray’s surroundings have been altogether deceived by his personal aura and charisma, overlooking in the process all signs of aging they might have noticed, if they had only been more attentive? This appears to be very difficult to maintain...

But on the other hand: as characters under the influence, both Dorian Gray and his surroundings seem to be without any doubt the involuntary victims of an all-encompassing as-ifworld, a kind of universal Schein!

Modernist and Postmodernist Versions of the Fantastic in Ireland
As we approach the contemporary literary scene, the Irish fantastic appears to undergo important structural changes. In Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “The Demon Lover” (1941) we are still pretty close to the classic fantastic. The setting of the plot is wartime London, where Mrs. Drover has returned ‘to her shut-up house in order to look for several things she wanted to take away’. [171] What she does not expect to receive is a letter from her former fiance, ‘reported missing, presumably killed’ in World War I (664)! Is her lover dead or alive? She is unable to answer this question, but the letter remains a mystery to her: ‘Letters dropped in at doors of deserted houses do not fly or walk to tables in halls. They do not sit on the dust of empty tables with the air of certainty that they will be found...’ (664-65) However this may be, Mrs. Drover attempts to escape from the house - and her existential predicament - in a taxi, but precisely the taxi driver turns out to be her former fiance (?), and

Mrs Drover’s mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets. (666)

The barren townscape through which her demon lover apparently elopes with her signalizes the existential loss she has undergone in a patriarchal society focused on maintaining a power structure, where there is clearly no room for female (or male) passion. Or as it is formulated by Eulalia Pifiero Gil: “The Demon Lover” deepens in the feminine psyche to meet openly with women’s desires and ambitions in post-war society more concerned about the values of the domestic order and with militarism. Bowen’s resistance to these attitudes is reflected in her use of the female Gothic fantasies to subvert the symbolic order of patriarchal society’. [18]

Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” could be compared to other feminist versions of high modernism, such as we come across them in, say, Virginia Woolf or H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Anyway, the radical critique of the routines and mundane realities of the modern everyday world and the attempt to create an alternative space for the female self (and for female desire) is certainly something these three women writers have in common.

Flann O’Brien (a pen name for Brian O’Nolan, who also wrote as Myles na Gopaleen in The Irish Times) has been classified as (among other things) a writer of fantastic fiction, and his novel The Third Policeman (published posthumously in 1967) was originally rejected by the publisher (Longman) for precisely this reason: ‘We realise the author’s ability but think he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so’. [ 191 In an article in That Other World Monique Gallagher characterizes The Third Policeman as follows:

[it] resembles O’Brien’s other productions insofar as it is a vehicle for the creation of another reality, an “unreality”, with new connections between people and objects, new spaces, new elements man is as capable of calculating the time of his death by the mere thickness of a robe bestowed upon him at birth; a bicycle can be hanged for murder; a cigarette can burn endlessly without being consumed. (198)

In The Dalkey Archive (1964) one of the characters is actually “borrowed’ from The Third Policeman (which was written much earlier, but as I pointed out rejected by the publisher), i.e. the mad scientist De Selby. In The Dalkey Archive De Selby has come up with ‘a ghastly plan for world catastrophe’. [20] Or as it is expressed by De Selby himself. ‘After extreme study and experiment I have produced a chemical compound which totally eliminates oxygen from any given atmosphere’(20). The chemical compound is never let loose upon the world, however, and later in the novel De Selby is reported to have second thoughts about bringing about a universal catastrophe - and his ‘secret’ is safely deposited by the protagonist of the novel (Michael Shaughnessy) in the Bank of Ireland:

[...] ‘I will make an end of all my experiments [De Selby is reported to have said] and return as a peaceable citizen to Buenos Aires, where my good patient wife is waiting for me. I have plenty of money, honestly earned’[ ... ] (151). We must bear in mind in this connection that Buenos Aires is the city of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most astounding - and convincing - representatives of the postmodernist version of the fantastic!

What De Selby is carrying out - apart from his attempt to put terrorism on a global scale on the agenda - could be characterized as an experiment with time (‘[...] a deoxygenated atmosphere cancels the apparently serial nature of time and confronts us with true time and simultaneously with all the things which time has ever contained or will contain, provided that we invoke them’(21)). In terms of genre The Dalkey Archive illustrates very well the way(s) in which hybrid genres proliferate under the auspices of postmodernism - where genre boundaries regularly tend to break down. O’Brien mixes science-fiction elements with bits and pieces that rather remind us of classic fantastic fiction - there is a strong emphasis on supernaturalism, but at the same time the ontological status of the latter is explicitly problematized - and furthermore grotesque and carnivalesque narrative elements are mingled profusely with the rest. Like Jorge Luis Borges in quite a few stories of his O’Brien also makes use of a well-known author for his own personal purposes: as a matter of fact, James Joyce returns to the earth as a barman in the seaside resort of Skerries and at the end of the novel attempts to be ordained ‘a Jesuit priest’(184)! As it happens in quite a few science-fiction novels (for instance in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle ( 1962), where World War II was won by the Germans and the Japanese (!), history is thus re-written with a vengeance in The Dalkey Archive.

Samuel Beckett’s fiction and plays frequently border on the fantastic (is Godot God or doesn’t he even exist, is he just a figment of the two tramps’ imagination, are Hamm and Clov really facing a ‘world catastrophe’, etc., etc.?). As an example of Beckett’s minimalist approach to the fantastic mode I shall focus on one of his very brief texts: ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ (1966). In A Samuel Beckett Reader (1983) Samuel Beckett in his minimalist phase is characterized by John Calder as a writer ‘fusing word and image into a new form of prose poetry’. [21] Furthermore, Calder portrays Beckett in these late texts as ‘a conceptual painter who paints in words’ (254).

What happens in “Imagination Dead Imagine” is, as a matter of fact, very little. The text focuses on two bodies that apparently ‘lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging [...]’(257). But even in this barren world -

where it is even difficult to determine whether the two bodies portrayed are dead or alive - Beckett does establish intertextual links to earlier texts. As a matter of fact, these intertextual references play an important thematic role in this ultra-brief narrative text. Thus Shakespeare is obviously quoted in the following passage: ‘Hold a mirror to their lips, it mists’ (256). This quotation undoubtedly echoes the ending of Shakespeare’s King Lear (the Quarto of 1608), where the King enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms: ‘...lend me a looking glasse, / If that her breath will mist or staine the stone, / Why then she lives’. [22] The storm in “Imagination Dead Imagine’ furthermore clearly echoes the storm in Lear - but in Beckett’s text there seems to be no possibility of a cathartic outcome of this experience, as far as the two protagonists are concerned. They appear to remain within the same no-man’s-land from beginning to end - placed within two containers, ‘back to back head to arse’ (Beckett 256). Light, darkness, heat, and cold is what they confront, and the whole setting (the “abstract” scenario) reminds us of Gybrgy Lukdcs’ famous denunciation of modernism in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957, 1962), where he associates modernism with what he calls abstract potentiality: ‘Abstract potentiality belongs wholly to the realm of subjectivity [...]’, [23] and furthermore, Jm1odern subjectivism, taking the imagined possibilities for actual complexity of life, oscillates between melancholy and fascination [ ... ] The abstract character of potentiality is clear from the fact that it cannot determine development - subjective mental states, however permanent or profound, cannot here be decisive [...]’(22). Apart from Lukics’ Marxist terminology, it is obvious that what Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine” focuses on is precisely a whole range of potential situations/settings rather than a plot in the proper sense of the word, i.e. if by plot we think of an action taking place in historical time!

With John Banville’s novel Mefisto we have reached the end of the chronological spectrum. I shall only offer a few brief comments on this immensely complicated novel - and it goes without saying that I am not doing it justice in this manner. According to Neil Cornwell, what characterizes Mefisto is its constant emphasis on indeterminacies, ‘which place it notwithstanding its strong metafictional and intertextual emphases, somewhere close to the pure-fantastic sector in the postmodern spectrum’ (Cornwell, 183). What furthermore is characteristic of Mefisto is the way it takes up the legend of Doctor Faustus and puts it into a new (Irish) context. Gabriel Swan is the young man initiated into the mysteries of the mathematical science, but on his way through life he is over and over again tempted by a mysterious double, Felix, who may or may not have something to do with (or be another version of) his dead twin brother.

However this may be, Gabriel Swan corresponds to Faustus and Felix to Mephistophiles (Mefisto) in the Faust legend. And Gabriel literally descends into hell at the end of Part One (“Marionettes”), where ‘[t]he floor sagged, groaning, and with a crash collapsed [ ... ] My hair was on fire. A red roar came up out of the hole, and I flew on flaming wings [like Icarus (!)], clutching my black book, through smoke and dust and splintering glass, into the huge, cold air’. [24] In the Second Part of the novel - entitled “Angels” - Gabriel is a patient and a convalescent in a hospital for an extended period of time, but again he meets Felix (his tempter) and is involved with his “gang”! At the end of the novel, however, Gabriel decides to turn his back on mathematics as well as his new companions (or those that are left of them): ‘No. In future, I will leave things, I will try to leave things, to chance’ (234). Science without conscience has not been able to help him in his existential dilemmas, for the stakes of his life could never be figured out by means of the calculus. Icarus has returned to the earth without further ado!

1.   Zondergeld, Rein A., ‘Wege nach Sa y s. Gedanken zur phantastischen Litteratur”, in Phaicon 1. Almanach der phantastischen Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Inset Verlag, 1. Auflage, 1974) 90 (my translation).
2.   Cornwell, Neil, The Literary Fantastic. From Gothic to Postmodernism (New York, etc.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) 183 (my italics).
3.  Cahill, Ann, ‘Irish Folktales and Supernatural Literature: Patrick Kennedy and Sheridan Le Fanu’, in: That Other World. The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and Its Contexts, Vol. 1, ed. Bruce Stewart (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998) 316.
4.   Le Fanu, Sheridan, In a Glass Darkly (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995) 11 (Le Fanu’s italics).
5.  Punter, David, The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the present day (London and New York: Longman, 1980) 242.
6.   Le Fanu, 1, 2.
7.   McCormack, W.J., Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester UP, 1993) 153, quoted in Thomas Loe: ‘The Strange Modernism of Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea”, in That Other World, Vol. 1, 298.
8.   Loe, 303 (cf. note 10).
9.   Cf. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952), in particular 261-86 (Chapter IX).
10.  Le Fanu, 33.
11.  Cf, Le Fanu, 5: ‘[Jennings] knew German, and had read my Essays on Metaphysical Medicine which suggest more than they actually say’.
12.  The Essential Dracula. A Completely Illustrated & Annotated Edition of Brain Stoker’s Classic Novel, ed. Raymond McNally & Radu Florescu (New York City: Mayflower Books, 1979) 117. According to the editors, ‘[w]e know that Stoker was familiar with Le Fanu’s works, especially Ina Glass Darkly (1872); in that book the narrator is a secretary who is arranging the papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a Swedenborgian physician who tries to save a Reverend Mr. Jennings in the tale “Green Tea”, but Jennings cuts his throat with a razor. Dr. Martin Hesselius could be part of the inspiration for Dr. Van Helsing’ (117, note 191).
13.  Stoker, Brain, Dracula’s Guest (London: Arrow Books, Third Impression, 1975) 8.
14.  Rank, Otto, The Double. A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated and Edited, with an Introduction by Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971) 73.
15.  Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. David Crystal and Derek Strange with an Introduction by Anthony Burgess (London: Penguin English, 1992) 34.
16.  Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated from the French by Richard Howard (Cleveland/London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973) 25 (my italics).
17.  The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. With an Introduction by Angus Wilson (London: Vintage, 1999) 661.
18.  Gil, Eulalia Piftero, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and the Female Gothic Fantasies”, in That Other World, Vol. 1, 175.
19.  Quoted from Monique Gallagher, ‘The Third Policeman: A Grave Yam’, in That Other World, Vol. 2, 197.
20.  O’Brien, Flann, The Dalkey Archive (Hammersmith, London: Flamingo, 1993) 70.
21.  A Samuel Beckett Reader, ed. John Calder (London: Picador, 1983) 254.
22.  King Lear. The Quarto of 1608 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) V,iii,261-63.
23.  Lukacs, Georg, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Translated from the German by John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, Second Impression, 1969) 23-24.
24.  Banville, John, Mefisto (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986) 120.