This article reassesses the place of Dracula within a supposed Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition by stressing continuities between Stoker's portrayal of the vampire and the (auto)biographical writings of major Ascendancy figures, and more particularly Elizabeth Bowen's family memoir Bowen's Court. It qualifies the recent focus on Dracula's monstrous body as an allegorical site, and argues that the Irish subtext of the novel may be most palpable in more muted forms of psychological Gothic. It attempts to refine our definitions of Anglo-Irish Gothic, and constitutes a new intervention in the debate that has raged over Dracula's Irish identity.

Modernism has been one of the most contested categories of English literary history. Over the last two decades, reputations have been challenged, ideologies have been questioned, and the very concept of an "English modernism" has given way to views that stress the importance of national contexts in the relation that modernist texts bear to history. It has become increasingly difficult to speak of "English modernism" as though it were a "British" or "Anglo-Saxon" category that includes names which were usually lumped together: Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Yeats, etc. 1 Irish literature scholars in particular have been keen to reclaim Yeats and Joyce as part of a distinctively Irish version of modernism, sometimes analyzing their works through postcolonial theory. 2 The postcolonial challenge and the devolutionary process that affect the canon of English-speaking modernism strike at the very root of what was originally meant by the term: indeed, cosmopolitanism and internationalism were long supposed to be hallmarks of modernism. Those qualities have not been completely discarded, but their nature and scope have been reexamined in the light of modernist writers' involvement in the cultural politics of specific nations. One aspect of modernist internationalism, however, clearly continues to operate unchanged in most readings. The impact of French symbolism has featured in most definitions of English-speaking modernism-in discussions of modern poetry in English, the terms "symbolism" and "modernism" are often virtually synonymous. 3 Edmund Wilson's groundbreaking study, Axël's Castle, set the tone as early as 1931, even before the term 'modernist' was applied to the writers Wilson discusses. According to him, it was only possible to make sense of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce or Stein by considering their debts to the symbolist school that developed around Stéphane

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This essay explores the intertextual use of Hamlet in Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl and Germaine de Staël's Corinne to shed new light on these writers' interventions in European Romantic politics. Both Owenson and Staël associated their male protagonists with the figure of Hamlet at a time when Shakespeare's Danish prince was being reinvented as an embodiment of Romantic weltschmerz and as a symbol for the powerless, isolated intellectual. Instead of contributing to the Romantic cult of a melancholy Hamlet, Owenson and Staël confront their protagonists with the influence of empowered Ophelias who illustrate a less solipsistic version of melancholy. Thus both authors criticize the inertia that gripped their male counterparts directly after the French Revolution. Staël's novel ultimately follows a tragic pattern, while Owenson's gestures toward the possibility of a comic ending. But beyond the different levels of optimism implied by those endings, Owenson and Staël deliver a similar message to the Romantic intellectual, a message that most Romantics ignored in their persistent cultivation of Hamletic attitudes.