Citation:
Date Published:
6 Jan, 2011Abstract:
The article focuses on Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924), a collection of ghost stories composed by Dorothy Macardle, a prolific Irish author, historian, and political journalist. The article demonstrates how Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the reader's hesitation, as central to the fantastic (and by extension the gothic genre), helps one understand Macardle's engagement with the sacrificial ideology of Irish nationalism. Macardle's collection of stories of supernatural apparitions during the troubled 1920s makes Irish history the sphere of the fantastic. It makes the reader hesitate - not between the different approaches to the supernatural - but between the conflicting ideological positions presented in the text.
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