Author Dara Downey

Dara Downey

Dara Downey is a visiting lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and the Trinity Access Programme. She is editor of The Irish Gothic Journal (online). She is author of American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (2014), and co-editor of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (with Ian Kinane and Elizabeth Parker, 2016). Her research focuses on domesticity in American gothic, and she is currently working on a literary biography of Shirley Jackson, as well as a longer-term project on servant figures in American gothic.

From Dangerous Outsiders to Beloved Innocents: Irish Servant Figures in American Gothic

Dara Downey

Articles, Issue 9 2020

In Georgia Wood Pangborn’s 1911 short story “Broken Glass,” the narrator, a fussy mother living somewhere in rural America, is reproached by a mysterious figure for having scolded her young Irish nursemaid. As ... Read More...

Review: Desirée Henderson, Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Dara Downey

Issue 3 2014, Reviews

“[…] the many genres of grief underscore the magnitude of the challenge of making death meaningful, as the unique and individual nature of loss runs up against the dominant conventions that shape memorial traditions and practices” (4).

‘The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism’: Navigating American Racial Anxiety in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

Cold Reality: Revisions of War in John Knowles’ ‘Phineas’ and A Separate Peace

The State Department’s Northern Ireland Special Envoys and the redemption of the Good Friday Agreement

“a settled place”: Reproductive Performance in the Liberties and The Liberties

“‘Normal People’ Indeed!”: Anne Tyler, Sally Rooney, and the Narrative of Youthful Quirk

Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner

Satire, Symbolism, and the “Working Through” of Historical Ghosts in The Confidence-Man

Review: Sawires-Masseli, Arab American Novels Post-9/11: Classical Storytelling Motifs against Outsidership

Review: Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

Review: Katherine Manthorne, Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex.

Review: Austenfeld, ed., Robert Lowell in a New Century

Review: Wills, Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture

Review: Christian Schmidt, Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction.

Review: Wickham Clayton, ed, Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film

The IAAS's Americanista: An Interview with Catherine Gander (IAAS Chair)

From Mitchelstown to Michigan: Kevin Roche’s Formative Years

From Dangerous Outsiders to Beloved Innocents: Irish Servant Figures in American Gothic

Review: Desirée Henderson, Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870