A reading of Maturin1 s six novels makes it necessary to reevaluate the general opinion that he is chiefly a gothic novelist. This gothic view of Maturin is founded predominantly upon readings of The Fatal Revenge (1807), his first novel, and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), his fifth. Although "traditional" gothic devices appear in both these novels, Maturin's searching analysis of Christianity as well as the specifically Irish framework make Melmoth, at least, more of a spiritual and social allegory than a gothic novel. Maturin also published four other novels: The Wild Irish Boy (1808), The Mi1esian Chief (1812), Women, or Pour et Contre (1818), and The Albigenses (1824). The first three of these novels are set in contemporary Ireland and they analyze various conflicting forces which, in Maturin1s view, retarded the building of a progressive and unified Irish society. In The Wild Irish Boy and The Mi.lesian Chief, for example, Maturin presents two approaches to the problem of Irish leadership, a problem which the Union with Great Britain in 1800 had magnified. In Women, also, he dramatizes particular religious and social tensions in Ireland; but in this case, it is the religious gulf which separates various groups and which the growing power of the Methodist community intensifies. His final novel, The Albigenses, likewise reflects religious tensions within Ireland; in this case, he reacts to the renewed threat posed by the native Catholics' quest for emancipation. Those who read these four novels --Scott, Morgan, Godwin, the Irish Catholics and the Irish Methodists, and other contemporaries --considered Maturin as more than simply a gothic novelist. Furthermore, if his letters to Sir Walter Scott and to Archibald Constable can be relied upon, Maturin regarded himself as a serious commentator upon Ireland's social and spiritual degeneracy rather than as a gothic novelist. Maturin, an Anglo-Irish clergyman who distrusted Catholic and Methodist alike, was a deeply spiritual man. To him, Ireland's civil chaos resulted from the misdirected spiritual energy of these two groups as well as from the presence of irresponsible Anglo-Irish and British social leaders. For him, a solution to these problems could only be created by sincere and devoted Christian living which was most easily gained by following the forms of the Church of England. Throughout his career as a writer, this belief formed the basis of both his sermons and novels alike; and furthermore,it inspired his search for an effective medium through which he could analyze and suggest solutions to the problems which, because of its unique collection of religions and races, existed in Ireland. By reading all his novels, therefore, and by considering them within the Irish context of the social and religious tensions in which he wrote, a view of Maturin emerges which shows him to be not only a gothic novelist, but also an Anglo-Irish controversialist. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)