![The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)](http://monsterbookshop.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/9781474487177_6ce0572b-0fb4-41e8-bfcc-6a79b8a7847f.jpg?v=1690076328&width=1445)
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.