Lectures in Week 6 are devoted to the place of Gothic fiction in Irish literature with some emphasis on Bram Stoker’s sensational novel Dracula (1897). In what sense is this a specifically Irish novel - given that it is not set in Ireland, nor concerns any Irish characters, Irish events, or conspicuously Irish themes?
 Indeed, how can a novelist who had nothing to say about the “revival” of Irish literature and lived his productive life in England be recruited as an Irish writer of any kind?
 The answer lies in the part played in that novel by the “colonial unconscious” and more especially by the idea of the “return of the repressed”, which makes Dracula seem like an embodiment of Irish historical crimes and Irish social terrors.
 An interpretation of this kind threaten (or, rather promises) to dislodge the dominant psycho-sexual interpretation of the novel exemplified by critics such as Christopher Craft - though perhaps we shouldn’t let it!