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).

“It was only the darkened house that could contain her”: Containing Forms in The Scarlet Letter

“Her Happy Solitary Life”: Singleness and Queering the Norm in “Martha’s Lady” by Sarah Orne Jewett and “A New England Nun” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Respectability Politics and the Culture of Dissemblance in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown

“Seeming Strangeness”: Mina Loy’s Poetics of Disruption and Julia Kristeva’s Semiotic/Symbolic Model

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

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

Review: Lahr, Arthur Miller: American Witness

Review: Robert Collins, Noraid and The Northern Ireland Troubles, 1970-1994

Review: Brian Yothers, Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author

Review: Charles L. Chavis Jr., The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State

Review: Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South

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

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