Reimagining Modernity: Derealized Hinterlands in Patrick McCabe’s New Gothic Fiction
Reimagining Modernity: Derealized Hinterlands in Patrick McCabe’s New Gothic Fiction

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the trope of hinterlands in Winterwood (2006), one of Patrick McCabe’s new Gothic or “Bog Gothic” fictions, with a view to revealing the process of reimagining, in contemporaneity, the Irish sense or “sensing of place” described by Seamus Heaney in an essay included in the collection Preoccupations. The term hinterland—or outland, as it appears in McCabe’s Winterwood—essentially carries the twofold connotations of margin and that which lies beyond the margin. In other words, the hinterland means both the back country (rural, barren wilderness)located outside the frames of civilized (urban, metropolitan) space and the very fringes that define the contours of this space and grant legitimacy to its pre-eminence in the cultural imaginary. McCabe’s Bog Gothic fiction demonstrates that literary representations of the Heaneyan “sense of place” can generate new lenses for envisioning the cultural geographies of Irishness.

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