Spectral History: The Stories of Dorothy Macardle

The article focuses on Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924), a collection of ghost stories composed by Dorothy Macardle, an Irish writer, historian, and political journalist. The article demonstrates how Tzvetan Todorovs concept of the readers hesitation, as central to the fantastic (and by extension to the gothic genre), helps one understand Macardles engagement with the sacrificial ideology of Irish nationalism. Macardles collection of stories of supernatural apparitions during the troubled 1920s makes Irish history the sphere of the fantastic. It makes the reader hesitate not between the different approaches to the supernatural, but between the conflicting ideological positions presented in the text.