The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry

ISBN-13: 9781474487177 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 320 str.

Olivia Loksing Moy

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Introduction: Gothic Tropes to Poetic Forms: A Poetics of Gothic Enclosure

1. Gothic Overhearing: Inquisition, Confession, and Accusation in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues

2. The Gothic Poetess: Self-Confinement in the Sonnet Cell

3. Gothic Shock and Swap: Suspended Bodies and Fluctuating Frames in D.G. Rossetti’s Double Works

4. The Cloistered Cleric: Confessional, Confinement, and Hopkins’ Poetics of Wavering

Conclusion: Emily Brontë's Udolphics: The Gondal and Non-Gondal Poems

Bibliography