"Keeping the Past Present": Time and the Shifting Bog in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass

Authors

Nancy Marck Cantwell, Daemen College

Department

English

Document Type

Article

Publication Source

Supernatural Studies

Publication Date

2017

Volume

4

Issue

1

First Page

38

Last Page

50

Abstract

Bram Stoker’s Irish novel, The Snake’s Pass, interrogates the continuity of Irish history and national identity through a legend explaining a Connemara bog’s supernatural influence, a story that portrays the trauma of Ireland’s dispossession as indelible and timeless. This reading of the novel employs Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of linear and monumental time to argue for the preeminence of the supernatural bog as a totem of Irish identity that persists in cultural memory to counter the forward momentum of the Anglo-Irish assimilation narrative.

Keywords

bog, Bram Stoker, dispossession, Ireland, Julia Kristeva

Comments

This is the final published version of the article, made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Recommended Citation

Cantwell, N. M. (2017). "Keeping the past present": Time and the shifting bog in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass. Supernatural Studies,4(1), 38-50.