The Gothic Family Romance

“The Gothic Family Romance is an ambitious and wide-ranging reading of Irish literature, densely informed by queer theory, feminism, and Marxism. . . . Backus’s provocative study should bring a complex and neglected body of fiction to the attention of a wider academic readership.” - Vera Kreilkamp , Victorian Studies

“[An] excellent book. . . . recommed[ed] to anyone interested in the gothic or in Irish literature. . . . Margot Gayle Backus makes a compelling case, not only for the persistence of the gothic throughout the Anglo-Irish tradition, but also for the reasons why these writers would have found that these tropes and conventions expressed the conscious and unconscious anxieties of their present situation and of the troubled past that continues to haunt them.” - Anne Williams , Studies in the Novel

“Backus’s command of history, both political and literary, is profound, and her analyses of individual works are subtle, detailed, and richly theorized. A prodigious piece of scholarship, this volume will almost certainly take a place among the most important postcolonial studies of Irish literature.” - D. W. Madden , Choice

“Margot Gayle Backus has written a book that will excite Gothic readers and critics, for in it, she shows the prominence of national and sexual themes in Gothic literature as well as the interdependence of their formations, topics of inquiry often treated separately.” - Marcie Frank , Gothic Studies

“Richly detailed contextual readings.” - , Science Fiction Studies

“A compelling history of the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition that is ambitious, convincing, and valuable.” - Mary Favret, Indiana University

“Backus’s fresh and unexpected insights into Irish Gothic texts along with the sophisticated and contemporary theoretical base of her argument should ensure this book an important place in Irish studies.” - Ann Owens Weekes, University of Arizona

“With extraordinary analytic clarity, Margot Backus sifts the troubling evidence of three centuries and offers valuable commentary on writings from Swift to Jennifer Johnston, from Edmund Burke to Frank McGuinness. This book resonates with grand ideas.” - Declan Kiberd, University College Dublin