2014-16

Ailise Bulfin

Ailise is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English.

Her project, the monograph Gothic Invasions, is an introduction to the late-Victorian and Edwardian phenomenon of invasion fiction, a paranoid literary development that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1890 and 1914.

It traces the roots of invasion anxiety to fears concerning the downside of Britain’s continuing imperial expansion: fears of growing inter-European rivalry and colonial wars and rebellion and explores how these fears were expressed in narratives that draw strongly upon the conventions and themes of Gothic writing.