The Bronts as Gothic Writers: The Afflicted Imagination
By (Author) James Thomas Quinnell
University of Wales Press
University of Wales Press
23rd July 2025
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Hardback
272
Width 138mm, Height 216mm
This book is the first extended study of the importance of Gothic for an appreciation of the Bronts' writing. It resituates Gothic from the mode that gives the pleasing sensation of terror to being the source of the Bronts' deepest preoccupations it is the mode they use to register anxieties and fears. This monograph, through a consideration of Gothic states and places, explores the Bronts' creative work with the genre. The author argues that to read the Bronts as Gothic poets and novelists is also to read them as post-Romantics, as they respond to the Gothic imaginations of such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Gothic in the Bronts, then, is not merely a collection of tropes or even an aesthetic, but a way in which they read the world.
James Thomas Quinnell is a teacher of English at Farnborough Hill School, Farnborough, Hampshire.