Antecedents of the Gothic mode in early modern poetry

This thesis evaluates the significance and deployment of 'Gothic' themes across a range of Renaissance love poems, arguing that a Gothic sensibility actively functions within the textual mode of early modern English poetry. It demonstrates the existence of this sensibility by tracing the co-presence of motifs of darkness, melancholy, the supernatural and the grotesque in early modern love poetry and eighteenth-century Gothic fiction. The methodological approach adopted here uses close readings combined with historical analysis to compare elements of the eighteenth-century literary Gothic with late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English poetry.