I want to focus in this chapter on qualities particular to Scottish and Irish Gothic fiction, wider histories of which are already available. More specifically, I propose to inquire into some of the general relations between history and the Gothic for Scotland and Ireland and to exemplify these issues through an extended consideration of two texts, one Irish and one Scottish, that might both, in very different ways, make some claim to have an “originary” status in the history of Gothic fiction. One of these is, perhaps, inescapable in any contemplation either of the Gothic in general or of the “Irish Gothic”: Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). My epitome of Scottish Gothic is less obvious, but carries, as I hope to show, a freight of themes that touch at many points on the Gothic: Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816).

I have in mind also the curious way in which current critical discourse seems to be forming itself round a certain terminology that owes much to the Gothic tradition. I have looked elsewhere at the contemporary preoccupation, in literary as well as in psychoanalytic theory, with crypts, phantoms, and processes of spectralization. Here I want to use different terms, principally the monument and the ruin. Both of these notions, I believe, point us toward the “uncanny,” in that they speak always of history, but of a history that is constantly under the threat of erasure. They speak of history not as a living presence nor yet as an irrecoverable absence, but as inevitably involved in specific modes of ghostly persistence which may occur when, particularly in Scotland and Ireland, national aspirations are thwarted by conquest or by settlement, as they have been so often. I want to show how the Gothic is especially powerful in rendering the complex hauntings in such conflicted histories.