Dissolute Characters

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.

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.