Agency and the Natural World in the Ecogothic fiction of Andrew Michael Hurley & Roundings Road, a novel

Abstract

This thesis consists of a novel, Roundings Road, a bridging statement and an extended critical analysis of Andrew Michael Hurley’s first three published novels. Both my novel and the critical study address the agency of protagonists in gothic fiction. 

        Roundings Road is a gothic novel set somewhere in Ireland and is a modern take on the vampire myth. The couple at the centre of the story, Francis and Fiona, are caught up in events that they seemingly can’t control, when they buy and move into an old house where Francis stayed as a student. 

        The critical study – ‘Agency and the Natural World in the Ecogothic Fiction of Andrew Michael Hurley’ – is an appraisal of Hurley’s first three novels, and my analysis engages with the ecogothic to consider its effect on the agency of protagonists. Through close readings I position his work within the ecogothic and larger gothic traditions. I show how Hurley uses gothic tropes and themes to present the reader with an indifferent and all-powerful natural world that ensures protagonists have futures that are preordained. Chapter 1 examines The Loney (2014), arguing that a priest’s experience of the sublime undermines his agency and religious belief. In Chapter 2, I investigate how a farming community’s fear of nature, in Devil’s Day (2017), results in fatalism. And Chapter 3 explores Hurley’s use of the supernatural in Starve Acre(2019), to ensure a married couple’s future is preordained.

        My bridging statement reflects on the relationship between creative and critical components by considering the writing process involved in both and delving into the gothic themes common to both Roundings Road and the novels of Hurley.