"A Land Poisoned": Eugene McCabe and Irish Postcolonial Gothic (Pre-published)

Abstract

While many of Eugene McCabe’s works adhere to the recognisable features of literary naturalism, including a fraught exposition of character, realist narrative language and pessimistic tone, it is my intention to spotlight the formal Gothic dimensions of these literary fictions. I will address, primarily, his most accomplished work to date, the novel Death and Nightingales and his acclaimed, and later televised, short story trilogy, ‘Cancer’, ‘Heritage’ and ‘Victims’. Land and violence are at the core of these narratives and, while the later novel is set in a pre-partition context, many of the same political strains surface across the stories. Appropriation, division, loyalty, and threat are pivotal to the narrative momentum of McCabe’s tales, as the author seeks to relate the indelible traumas that stain the physical and cultural landscape of both a pre-partition Ulster and post-partition borderland.