The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry

By Olivia Loksing Moy

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1474487173
• ISBN13: 9781474487177
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"