Gothic Fiction and Irish Children’s Literature

A survey of Irish children’s fiction, loosely defined as stories read by young people that were written by authors who were born or spent some time in Ireland, published from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century reveals no sign of a specifically Irish gothic tradition. Nevertheless, Irish children’s fiction of that period did not completely eschew the gothic. This chapter focuses on three texts for young readers that contain elements characteristic of gothic fiction: Lady Mount Cashell’s Stories of Old Daniel (1808); Peadar Ua Laoghaire’s Séadna (1904) and Claire Hennessy’s Nothing Tastes as Good (2016). The analysis of how the gothic elements in these very different texts from three different centuries interact with the acculturation impulse common to children’s fiction suggests that didacticism is the defining feature of children’s literature. However, within these texts, didactic acculturation is tempered by an anarchic embrace of the gothic in both English and Irish that transcends the type of social and political divisions that have been theorised as intrinsic to the emergence of Irish gothic fiction.