Unsettling Le Fanu: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Irish Settler Writing

Abstract

This thesis argues that the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) can be read as a form of settler writing. Using settler theory as a reading strategy in the analysis of Le Fanu’s short fiction, this thesis argues that his preoccupation with Irish colonial history and New English (Protestant) settlement demonstrates a need to retell the settler story. The thesis is premised on the a reactivation of the “settler perspective” in the years after the Act of Union, which contributed to a surge in supernatural, historical, and antiquarian writing by Irish Protestants from the 1820s onwards. Following the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, questions surrounding national identity came to fore and developed along increasingly sectarian lines. As a result, Irish Protestants adopted a settler perspective in the construction of a distinctly Irish Protestant identity, based upon a history of colonial settlement. The thesis considers a range of short stories from across Le Fanu’s career, beginning in 1838 and culminating with his death in 1873, all of which feature an Irish setting. Adopting a pluralist approach, the thesis considers both the material and the imaginative conditions that influenced Le Fanu’s work, particularly his involvement with the Dublin University Magazine, a long-standing periodical with a Protestant and Unionist ideology. This thesis provides new perspectives on some of Le Fanu’s most critically neglected fiction, as well as some of his most studied. The material and historical contexts supply new readings and point to previously overlooked aspects of Le Fanus work, while the application of settler theory places Le Fanu’s fiction within the broader cultural trends at work in the nineteenth century, opening discussion for new ways to think about Ireland’s colonial experiences.