This book provides a new account of the emergence of Irish gothic fiction in the mid-18th century. This new study provides a robustly theorised and thoroughly historicised account of the beginnings of Irish gothic fiction, maps the theoretical terrain covered by other critics, and puts forward a new history of the emergence of the genre in Ireland. This reading demonstrates the connections between little-known Irish gothic fictions of the mid-18th century, the Irish gothic tradition more generally, and also the gothic as a genre of global significance. The texts examined include: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, (Anon), The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley and Thomas Leland's Longsword. It provides a rigorous and robust theory of the Irish gothic. It reads early Irish gothic fully into the political context of mid-18th-century Ireland.