Theological Monsters

Studies three classic Irish Gothic works through the lens of theology.

This book explores how monsters articulate questions about the sacred in nineteenth-century Irish Gothic literature. The relationship between religion and Gothic literature has traditionally been approached through denominational readings, but Theological Monsters proposes that Irish Gothic texts, from Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer to Le Fanu's Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula, cannot be inscribed into particular doctrinal frameworks. Abandoning allegorical interpretations, Potter proposes that real-life theologies do not translate into the fictional ones articulated across these texts. The book's focus is, then, on revealing how the bodies of monsters make real and tangible otherwise abstract concepts associated with God and the afterlife. Therefore, the book identifies monstrosity as a valuable way of seeking to uncover knowledge of the divine in nineteenth-century Irish Gothic literature, proposing an original reassessment of three canonical writers--Maturin, Le Fanu, and Stoker--in order to highlight their fictional theological exercises.