Jim Kelly

Charles Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity and the Nation Jim Kelly

Charles Maturin (1780-1824) is best known today for his Gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). A thorough study of Maturin's wider work reveals him to have been a deeply conflicted writer at a time when a newly idealized conception of authorship was emerging alongside a ruthlessly commercial book industry. This is the first study to look at the entirety of Maturin's work in fiction, drama, and sermons within the context of changing attitudes to authorship, authenticity, and the idea of national literature in the Romantic period. Maturin emerges from this study a far more complex figure than his previous reception indicates, and also shows how his work engaged with issues at the heart of Irish, British, and European Romanticism. "Throughout his study, Kelly deftly situates Maturin and his works in the historical context of post-Revolutionary Britain, post-Union Ireland, and Napoleonic Europe, outlining the influence of many of Maturin's contemporaries..." Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 2012, Vol. 32, No. 1