The Protestant rhetoric only strengthens the Catholic resistance in the way it would in an Irish political context (applied power always provokes opposition). The Irish context of Maturin’s self-deconstructing project is decisive. In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Melmoth, Chris Baldick suggests the following: “When … Melmoth defends the Protestant view of the Bible against the Catholic Church, and we recall that this uncharacteristic behaviour is being related to us in a Jewish text transmitted by a Catholic, something more is involved than mere clumsiness or forgetfulness: an inadvertent dissolution of distinctions is taking place in which the same voice can utter sacrilegious sarcasms and pious platitudes almost in the same breath, erasing the clear line that was expected to lie between them in an ‘improving’ work of fiction” (xvi). 2021 (English) Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic) Abstract
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