Dissolute Characters

<p>Irish literature in English commands world-wide respect but it is rarely discussed in a comparative light. This study of the making and unmaking of character commences with Balzac's impact on nineteenth-century Irish fiction. Sheridan Le Fanu links Balzac and Swedenborg to Yeats and anticipates Elizabeth Bowen's deployment of ghost story conventions in the 1940s.<br><br>Through painterly imagery biblical quotation and the distortion of proper names Le Fanu shows character to be a self-consuming project. Yeats's Parnell emerges as a modernist gothic hero of the 1930s. Bowen's The heat of the day anatomises the problems of identity bequeathed by Yeats.<br><br>Radically revising the idea of a gothic tradition and traversing two centuries of Irish literary history Dissolute characters gives a fluent and detailed account of the emerging relation between Irish culture modernism and politics.</p>