"Robert Browning and the Gothic Imagination explores the centrality of familiar motifs associated with Gothic literature in Browning's literary development. The book builds on a series of critical observations about Gothic and Browning, largely from scholarly literature of the last decade, to explore the importance of the genre in Browning's intellectual formation and development. Providing readers with a simpler and more straightforward Browning - a poet among whose most accomplished and important poemsare also some of his most popular - the book also shows how a Gothic perspective allows him to navigate difficult and obscure emotions, and significantly restores Browning to the heart of Gothic literature. The primary readers for this book are academicsand postgraduate students in the fields of Victorian literature and Gothic studies"-- Provided by publisher.
The poetry of Robert Browning (1812–89) makes unmistakable use of the tropes of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, but only in the last few years has there been any interest in the poet’s wider relationship with the genre. Building on recent critical literature, Robert Browning and the Gothic Imagination is the first study systematically to demonstrate Gothic’s importance in Browning’s intellectual formation and development. It shows how a Gothic perspective enables him to explore complex and obscure emotions in his characters, while giving some of his most important poems the narrative propulsion of popular fiction. In doing so, it restores Browning to a place at the heart of nineteenth-century Gothic literature. The book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Victorian literature and Gothic studies.
Robert Browning and the Gothic Imagination explores the centrality of familiar motifs associated with Gothic literature in Browning's literary development.
Introduction
Chapter I: Brownings Gothic Beginnings
Chapter II: Lyric Terror, Dramatic Horror
Chapter III: The Evolution of a Gothic Poet, 18371853
Chapter IV: Dark Tower
Chapter V: Sludge, Bagehot, Caliban
Chapter VI: The Ring and the Book: Gothic Redivivus
Chapter VII: After Guido
Conclusion: Bloodred and Lamp-black
Justin Gilbert is an independent researcher and one of the editors of The Poems of Robert Browning (Longman Annotated English Poets). He completed his PhD in July 2024 on Robert Browning and Gothic literature.