Patrick Kavanagh, in his stark poem "Dark Ireland", wrote: "We are a dark people, / Our eyes ever turned / Inward / Watching the liar who twists / The hill-paths awry". In a slant way, he exposes a genre of writing that is concealed in plain sight, what might be called the Irish book of the dark. It comes out of the persistent tendency of Irish writers to occupy the shadows of the mind, often pushing the English language out of shape in the process. Last week's winner of the inaugural Goldsmiths prize, Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, is only the most recent example of this compulsive, unsettling tradition.

Ireland's history of colonisation, famine and flight, a collapsed revolution, a dominant church and the vitalising deformation of English by the Irish language have created conditions that occasioned writers to follow the twisting inward paths, and for the courageous, to look at the darkest of human behaviour and bring it to some form of light.

One might start in 1820 with Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Within the billowing gothic excess of this madly-plotted tale of a fatal bargain with evil powers is a novel of great psychological acuity that explores the terrors of loneliness, failure and madness in ways that make it seem peculiarly contemporary. The denseness, strange colouration and wild febrility of the writing pre-figures much "experimental" writing, encompassing surrealism and modernism alongside work that doesn't belong to any "-ism" at all. Melmoth haunts novels as different as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Patrick McCabe's brutal, sharp-etched The Butcher Boy and John Banville's laconic and unsettlingly funny Birchwood.

Turning from the lost mind to a blighted society, William Carleton's The Black Prophet of 1847, through a powerful melodrama of prophecy and murder, forced the gaze of its largely well-fed readers onto the terrible scenes of famine that were endemic in Ireland even before the Great Hunger. In the decade following the book's publication the death or desperate flight of millions of people left a legacy of loss and silence that shaped the narrative landscape of Ireland.

The centre of obscurity in modern literature is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake which is, as he intended, a book of the night. Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable inhabits the limits of knowing and saying the self. It is a voice "blind in the dark", but somehow Beckett makes us see and feel this and move, if we are able, beyond despair. John McGahern, in contrast to Joyce's late work, achieved an unmatched mastery of simplicity in language and with a compassionate and unwavering gaze wrote bravely of what was commonplace but could not be spoken of. This included, in The Dark, the quietly devastating revelation of the sexual abuse of children and the complicity of those, in the church and elsewhere, whose duty to them was love and protection.

Elizabeth Bowen was a great novelist (sometimes seen as too "Anglo" to be Irish), but it is her stories of the 1940s, many of the best of which are set in wartime London, that seem the strongest candidates for her books of the dark.Each short story is short in extent but massive in depth and presence. The Demon Lover and Mysterious Kôr are, in Bowen's phrase, "words to the dark", haunted and haunting accounts of loss, love and what comes after in the interval before death.

A book I particularly want to draw attention to is Dorothy Nelson's In Night's City, published in 1982 and largely forgotten now. It's a desperate, visceral novel of domestic violence, cruelty and complicity. Beneath the Irish idiom, Nelson's shifting, benighted voices seem to owe much to two great writers of the American South, William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. As with McGahern, Nelson broke the taboos around secrecy and denial and convincingly, painfully, showed how the abused self withholds from itself what it knows and yet cannot bear to know, to the point of breaking into pieces, very much prefiguring Eimear McBride's startling A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is fully deserving of its laurels. Written out of the body with total conviction and amazing virtuosity, it has a great, headlong music, both harsh and beautiful, and a grip on its own senses that makes vivid the darker places that realism rarely reaches. The novel doesn't offer consolation, but leaves the reader with the sense that they know something essential, vital even, that they could not have come to know by any other imaginative means. Without question, McBride's novel belongs in the company of the best books of the dark.