| Don't you mean "Romantic" or "Victorian"? Excepting Shakespeare, the British authors you mention fall in those periods, and so does Nat Hawthorne. I do agree that "Gothic" can fit the Brontės; Dickens' depression, however, has a different source and context: the urban poor of his day, among which he spent some rather hellish times as a child. If I had suffered what he suffered, I'd write bleak books too.
I must also disagree with another point: good literature is serious, assuming we understand serious to mean, in this context, "of or relating to a matter of importance." Even comedies can do this. Perhaps what should be objected to is an exclusive emphasis on somber literature.
You are correct, however, that there is a kind of cult of "high literature" that is chosen for scholastic consumption to the exclusion of all else. Tolkien is among the authors to suffer from this cult, as a survey of critical reaction to his work will show. A friendly critic, commenting on the general backlash against LotR, hypothesized that modern "good" literature consisted principally of whining, self-absorbed, despairing characters fornicating in a random suburb of a large city, or possibly in the city itself. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but there is certainly an element of "life sucks without end; there is no hope" to most things that are considered to be "good" literature these days.
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Ancient literature is cool. Read the Illiad. Read the Odyssey. Read Gilgamesh. Read Ovid. Read Horace.
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