TRADITIONS AND METAMORPHOSES OF IRISH FOLKLORE IN JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU’S GHOST STORIES

The Victorian Anglo-Irish writer, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, had Irish folklore and folk beliefs around him all his life, and they are presented in many of his ghost stories. The present research investigates how the writer inventively modifies Irish folklore motives and joins them with traditional Gothic elements. As a result, the article presents a comparative literary study of such author’s manipulations which lead to the creation of Le Fanu’s own kind of spectacular Gothic.KEY WORDS: Gothic literature, ghost story, Irish folklore, metamorphoses, psychological terror