This book details the story of the O'Connors, an Irish family. "The Last Heir of Castle Connor," is a non-supernatural story about the decline and expropriation of Ireland's ancient Catholic gentry under the Protestant Ascendancy.

This series presents a comprehensive, global and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written ... by a international team of scholars ... -- dust jacket.

This book considers the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) in its original material and cultural contexts of the early-to-mid Victorian period in Ireland. Le Fanu’s longstanding relationship with the Dublin University Magazine, a popular literary and political journal, is crucial in the examination of his work; likewise, his fiction is considered as part of a wider surge of supernatural, historical and antiquarian activity by Irish Protestants in the period following the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1801). This study discusses in detail Le Fanu’s habit of writing and re-writing stories – a practice that has engendered much confusion and consternation – while posthumous collections of his work are compared with original publications to demonstrate the importance of these material and cultural contexts. In new critical readings of aspects of Le Fanu’s best-known fiction, light is cast on some of his overlooked work through recontextualisation.

This book explores how three Anglo-Irish writers, J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, use settings in their short fictions to recreate, depict and confront Ireland’s colonial situation in the nineteenth century. This study provides an innovative approach by targeting a genre (the short story) which has not been explored in its entirety— certainly not within nineteenth century Ireland - much less using a postcolonial approach to the short story. Added to this is the fact that it analyses how these writers used settings as an anticolonial tool. To do so, the book is divided into two major sections, an analysis of Irish settings and non-Irish ones. It works on the premise that all three writers used the idea of displacement to target colonialism and its effects on Irish society. In short, this book addresses a gap in scholarship, as the Irish Gothic short story as a decolonizing tool has not been sufficiently and globally studied.