The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry

Victorian poets remixed and remastered signature tropes from 1790s Gothic novels, establishing canonical nineteenth-century poetic forms.

A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in ‘low-brow’ titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes — inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies — were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry identifies a poetics of Gothic enclosure constitutive of high Victorian poetry that came to define key nineteenth-century poetic forms, from the dramatic monologue, to women’s sonnet sequences and metasonnets, to Pre-Raphaelite picture poems.

• | Author: Olivia Loksing Moy
• | Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• | Publication Date: Sep 13, 2022
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Hardback
• | ISBN-13: 9781474487177
• | ISBN-10: 1474487173