Transnational Gothic: English and Irish Novel Adaptations Across Eras

Thesis Abstract

This study investigates how Gothic sensibilities circulate between English and Irish novel traditions across historical periods, addressing gaps in transnational reception, adaptation economies, and genre hybridization that have shaped national imaginaries and cross-channel influence. The problem centers on the Anglo-Irish literary field’s tendency to reinscribe Gothic motifs—haunted landscapes, uncanny doubles, and ambivalent home-fronts—in ways that obscure or complicate borders of authorship, audience, and cultural memory. The aim is to explicate how English and Irish novels adapt Gothic paradigms through cross-cultural contact, colonial histories, and transnational networks from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, with three?? objectives (1) to map ontological shifts of Gothic motifs across cross-border adaptations, (2) to analyze how publication, serialization, translation, and media adaptations recalibrate genre expectations, and (3) to evaluate the implications of these reframings for national and postcolonial literary imaginations. The methodology adopts a comparative, mixed-methods design combining corpus-based text analysis, reception study, and interpretive criticism. The population comprises nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and Irish Gothic novels and their major adaptations (film, television, and digital retellings) produced within transnational circuits. A purposive sample of 40 primary texts is selected to represent key eras (Romantic, Victorian, Modernist/Partition, and Contemporary) and four major adaptation trajectories. Data collection instruments include a digital text corpus annotated with Gothic toponyms, motifs, and spectral figures; adaptation case studies drawing on production notes, reviews, and audience reception data; and semi-structured expert interviews with ten scholars specializing in English and Irish Gothic. Validity and reliability are ensured through triangulation across textual analysis, adaptation studies, and reception data, with intercoder reliability checks (Cohen’s kappa ? 0.80) for motif coding. Analytical procedures proceed in three stages. First, thematic and motif-based analysis using Qualitative Content Analysis identifies recurrent transnational motifs and their recontextualization across eras, supported by a coding framework anchored in Campbellian and Freudian Gothic tropes. Second, social network analysis models the transnational circulation of texts, authors, and adaptations, employing Pajek to visualize cross-border linkages and influence metrics. Third, a comparative reception analysis applies Bayesian regression to assess how translation, serialization, and media adaptation influence critical reception scores and readership demographics, with control variables including publication year, author nationality, and corpus size. The study also engages two theoretical frameworks Romantic–Gothic theory as articulated by Peter Brooks and Linda Nochlin’s question of national imaginaires within postcolonial contexts, complemented by Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and liminality to interpret interstitial Gothic forms that straddle English and Irish identities. The resulting conceptual model foregrounds transnational Gothic circuits, adaptation as a site of genre negotiation, and reception as a driver of national discourse. Expected findings indicate that cross-border adaptations intensify spectral hybridity, producing a distinct Irish-English Gothic idiom characterized by liminal spaces, diasporic memory, and contested sovereignty. Quantitatively, motifs such as hauntings, doubles, and ruins will show increasing cross-era recurrence in adaptations, while reception data will reveal more favorable critiques for transnationally adapted narratives when they foreground hybrid temporality and multilingual signification. Qualitatively, it is anticipated that Irish texts will foreground postcolonial critique and resistance through Gothic frames, whereas English texts will emphasize metropolitan anxiety and cosmopolitan modernity, with notable convergence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through media convergence and global fan cultures. This study contributes to knowledge by detailing a structured model of transnational Gothic adaptation, enriching understandings of how national literatures negotiate borders through the Gothic. It offers a refined methodological framework for analyzing cross-cultural genre circulation and demonstrates how adaptation acts as a catalyst for rethinking Gothic form and function in postcolonial and global contexts. The primary conclusion posits that transnational Gothic adaptations in English and Irish literature reveal a dynamic interplay between localization and global networks, yielding new Gothic intelligences that reshape theories of genre, nationalism, and literary history. Recommendations include expanding corpus scope to include Irish-language Gothic texts, broadening reception studies to include social media analytics, and applying the model to other national Gothic contexts to assess universality and variance in transnational Gothic development.