The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Post-Contemporary Interventions) [Paperback]

Margot Backus (Author)

Book Description

Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions | Publication Date: November 4, 1999

Tales of child sacrifice, demon lovers, incestual relations, and returns from the dead are part of English and Irish gothic literature. Such recurring tropes are examined in this pioneering study by Margot Gayle Backus to show how Anglo-Irish gothic works written from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries reflect the destructive effects of imperialism on the children and later descendents of Protestant English settlers in Ireland.
Backus uses contemporary theory, including that of Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to analyze texts by authors ranging from Richardson, Swift, Burke, Edgeworth, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary Irish novelists and playwrights.
By charting the changing relations between the family and the British state, she shows how these authors dramatized a legacy of violence within the family cell and discusses how disturbing themes of child sacrifice and colonial repression are portrayed through irony, satire, “paranoid” fantasy, and gothic romance. In a reconceptualization of the Freudian family romance, Backus argues that the figures of the Anglo-Irish gothic embody the particular residue of childhood experiences within a settler colonial society in which biological reproduction represented an economic and political imperative.
Backus’s bold positioning of the nuclear family at the center of post-Enlightenment class and colonial power relations in England and Ireland will challenge and provoke scholars in the fields of Irish literature and British and postcolonial studies. The book will also interest students and scholars of women’s studies, and it has important implications for understanding contemporary conflicts in Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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

From the Publisher

“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

“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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (November 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822324148
• ISBN-13: 978-0822324140
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,989,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Gothic, November 24, 2000

By 

Spurgeon Thompson (Nicosia, Cyprus) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

In a well-known scene of Gothic horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula "throws a moving, whimpering bag at the feet of his three wives." He offers it for their consumption in exchange for the man they have surrounded, the man he desires, Jonathan Harker. In the bag, of course, is a struggling child.

In this breathtaking study Margot Backus unties the strings binding that bag and makes visible the suffering and fear in that child's face when it realizes its fate. In the same Duke University Press series as Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and David Lloyd's Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (1993), this book matches the standard of complexity of its predecessors. It not only presents the first substantive materialist reading of the Gothic, providing a refreshing corrective to the long familiar, almost singularly psychoanalytic approaches that dominate organizations like the International Gothic Association. It also insists on the inseparability of materialist critique, psychoanalytic approaches, and anti-colonialist critical models. All three are Backus's starting points. And broadening her staging ground still further, a critique of heteronormativity is rigorously incorporated into the analyses throughout.

This makes for an ambitious project. But it is a project that largely keeps its promises through some of the most complex, occluded, and liminal terrain in Irish Cultural Studies. For this reason alone, it deserved the ACIS Durkan Prize for best first book in any field, which it has won this year.

At the heart of Backus's analysis is the problem of child sacrifice within the Anglo-Irish colonial order. Backus explains: "A relatively unmentioned fact of colonial and postcolonial politics is that colonial rule, particularly where colonialism has taken the form of mass settlement, requires the production of children" (2). Furthermore, to keep the system going, to legitimate and perpetuate settler rule, this class sacrifices its children.

For the violent colonial order into which settler children are born predates them, remains a priori to their consent, and will repeatedly interpellate them regardless of their assent or refusal. Constricting, turned inwards upon itself, the settler family cell becomes a chamber of horrors re-inflicting the violence of its traumatic origins and present entrenchment upon its children. Isolated and embattled, the settler class becomes autophagous and pedophagous, i.e., self and child-consuming (two key terms for Backus). The appropriation of children's sexuality through incest, for example, becomes one mode of pedophagy. Indeed incest, adult/child rape, and a range of violations echo throughout this class's domestic history. Crucially, however, it is a history that has been vigilantly silenced. But, as this book teaches us, it is a silence that can become audible if one knows where to listen.

5.0 out of 5 stars a great book, January 22, 2008

By 

Georgieva (Nice, France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

I won't be writing a long review since it is absolutely unnecessary. The book is mastefully written, by a skilled researcher. Inspiring, entertaining and remarkably easy to read. Great bibliography and very useful! Clear structure, well-presented arguments, quotes are to the point and from a wide variety of texts. Am simply loving it :)