May We One Day Be Found

Abstract

May We One Day Be Found is a novel inspired by a historical event that has never been approached before in fiction: the founding of a colony of Irish immigrants, established in a forested area in Southern Missouri now called the Irish wilderness, and its mysterious and unexplained abandonment during the Civil War. This novel utilizes knowledge gaps in the objectively reported timeline of events to tell a darkly fantastical story about the disintegration of the colony in the face of inexplicable outside threats, anxieties about war, and each other’s transgressions and fears. The critical introduction for this dissertation positions the novel in the creative and scholarly contexts of the Rural Gothic and Folk Horror, the latter of which is a nascent field of study in literature, art, music, and film; both these contexts work as dark subversions of the Pastoral and adopt customs and conventions of the broader Gothic tradition and its concerns for rural colonized settings. May We One Day Be Found is also meant to be read as a work of fiction that relies heavily upon conventions and theories inherent to critical studies of the Weird and the Eerie, as well as traditions of the Uncanny in general.