Theological Monsters
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A01=Madeline Potter
Author_Madeline Potter
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
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Gothic
Irish
Madeline
Monsters
Potter
Religion
Theological
Product details
- ISBN 9781837723546
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jan 2026
- Publisher: University of Wales Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 this study proposes how Irish Gothic texts from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer to Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Bram Stoker’s Dracula resist being inscribed into particular doctrinal frameworks. Abandoning allegorical interpretations, Theological Monsters proposes that real-life theologies do not translate into the fictional ones articulated across these texts. The focus is on revealing how the bodies of monsters make real and tangible otherwise abstract concepts associated with God and the afterlife, and on identifying monstrosity as a valuable way to uncover knowledge of the divine in nineteenth-century Irish Gothic literature. What follows is an original reassessment of three canonical writers – Maturin, Le Fanu and Stoker – highlighting their fictional theological exercises.
Madeline Potter is an early career teaching and research fellow in the literature of the long nineteenth century, at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores the intersections of theology and Gothic literature, with a focus on monster and vampire fictions.
