Dark Romanticism is a genre steeped in complex emotions and expressions of individualism. We hope this guide is particularly useful for students and teachers.
First, let's deal with the meaning of Romanticism. It values beliefs and emotions as more important than logic or facts. The individual comes first, and often involves the worship of nature or a whale? Dark Romanticism is distinguished from Romanticism in its emphasis on human fallibility and sin they are pessimists , whereas Romantics believe in human goodness they are optimists. According to Dark Romantics, even good men and women drift towards sin and self-destruction, and there can be unintended consequences that arise from well-intended social reforms.
The genre of "Dark Romanticism" is thought to have emerged from the Transcendental Movement in 19th century America. Whereas Transcendentalists felt perfection and their own divinity as innate qualities of mankind they thiought utopian communes would work , Dark Romantics believed humans gravitate to evil and self-destruction striving for a utopian society is a waste of time.
Stories in this genre share many characteristics of Realism tell it like it is, what can go wrong, will. Dark Romantics focus on human fallibility, self-destruction, judgement, punishment, as well as the psychological effects of guilt and sin. There's an even darker side of the Dark Romantics: Gothic Literature , which involves sheer terror, personal torment, graphic morbidity, and the supernatural. Here's a helpful overview of the characteristics, origin, and exemplar authors to help you better understand Dark Romanticism.
You might also enjoy H. Melville's Captain Ahab is the prototype of human fallibility, and he draws upon amble Biblical allusions including his character names centering on themes of judgement, guilt, sin, souls, and the end of the world. See Moby-Dick - Study Guide. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne exemplifies Dark Romanticism in its themes of imposed judgement and punishment for those who commit sin, resulting in alienation and self-destruction.
Hawthorne's most famous novel examined the human soul and our morality-- certainly a cautionary tale about the dangers of well-intended social reform and blind religious fervor. While Hawthorne dappled in numerous genres, including Transcendentalism, he found his niche in Dark Romanticism, albeit on the less pessimistic side. He believed that for all of our weaknesses, hypocrisy and suffering, "the truth of the human heart" usually prevails. Practically all of Edgar Allan Poe 's canon falls in the Dark Romantic genre, in which he explored the psychology of the conscious and subconscious mind.
A Descent Into the Maelstrom is a fine example. Many of Poe's works are on the dark end of the Dark Romantic spectrum, into the realm of Gothic Fiction with macabre tales of horror, morbidity, and madness. Fine example: The Fall of the House of Usher , which deals with mental conditions such as hypochondria and hyperethesia sensory overload. Poe was also credited as the creator of the detective fiction genre, as in his story, The Purloined Letter.
Poe literally provided a template for detective authors to follow, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A fun fact about Poe: he really disliked Transcendentalists, referring to them as "Frogpondians" after the pool in Boston Commons. Emily Dickinson challenged the definitions of poetry and exemplify Dark Romanticism. It's well-known that she led an increasingly reclusive life, afflicted by severe depression, and never saw success during her lifetime she died at Yet, her creative energy, willingness to fight conventions no titles, short lines , and prolific writing she wrote nearly 1, poems in her lifetime, but published very few established her literary prowess and blazed a trail for other poets and women writers to follow.
Both these stories relate to the insanity a human being can experience after a traumatic experience. Through careful examination, we can uncover the darkness within these tales along with observing. Edgar Allan Poe was a typical representative of the 19th century literary movement - Dark Romanticism.
Speaking of the cultural context of the work, I would like to refer to Kerry Vermillion and Quinn McCumber, who considered the works of Edgar Allan Poe to be influenced. It was written during the period of romanticism, a time when many people took the opposite ideology of rationalism, believing that imagination, nature, feeling, and nature are more important than logic and society.
However, this work is placed into the sub genre of Dark Romanticism, whose works deal with feelings rather than reason, and viewed events as symbols pointing beyond menial. Dark romanticism was a peculiar literary period during the romanticism era which was led by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It focused on opposing views from that of transcendentalist and leaned towards a gothic style.
Poe and Hawthorne wrote about faulty human nature and of secret sin, that all humans hide. They also wrote with the purpose of starting a social reform without causing a huge uproar. Throughout their writing, the author's utilized literary tropes in order further their narrative.
Edgar Allan Poe is often considered one of the most famous, influential writers of the 19th century, and even today he is still revered for his more famous works, which are still taught and studied in schools and universities around the United States.
His work is considered to be heavily influenced by the many hardships he faced during his lifetime, which can be seen in almost all of his poems or short stories. Yet, most of these writers in different ways also exhibited the darker tones of Romanticism when dealing with American life. Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps the best-known American Romantic who worked in the so-called Gothic mode. His poems and stories explore the darker side of the Romantic imagination, dealing with the Grotesque, the supernatural, and the horrifying.
Poe also rejected the rational and the intellectual in favour of the intuitive and the emotional, a dominant characteristic of the Romantic Movement. Hence, in his critical theories and through his art, Poe emphasized that didactic and intellectual elements had no place in art. The subject matter of art should rather deal with the emotions, and the greatest art was that which had a direct effect on the emotions.
For Nathaniel Hawthorne literature also seemed to depend on the possibility of the Gothic. Hence, of particular interest to Hawthorne was the nature of evil. Like his contemporary Poe, Hawthorne also made extensive use of symbols. Would not this, in other words, be the separation of the intellect from the heart. Some critics think that Poe was only a marketer of Gothic horror borrowed from the German models popular during his time. For this reason, it is necessary to take a closer look at American Romanticism as a literary movement first.
American Romanticism or the American Renaissance, cf. The rise of Romanticism in Britain contributed to the emergence of literature in America. Romanticism challenged conventional ways of thinking and aesthetic traditions and championed the authority of the individual mind responding to the environment without regard to social conventions or moral prohibition. English Romanticism was thus influenced by the Gothic and characterized by an internalization of Gothic forms: Gothic objects, settings, situation became figures of inner states of the mind and the emotions.
Romanticism differs significantly from Classicism, the period Romanticism rejected. Hence, Romantic literature rebelled against the formalism of eighteenth-century reason, being more concerned with emotion than rationality. It generally values the individual over society, nature over the city. What is more, it also questions or attacks rules, conventions and social protocol. It sees humanity living in nature as morally superior to civilized humanity.
What is more, it also conceives of children, essentially innocent by nature, as being corrupted by their surroundings. Hence, Romantic literature places an emphasis on the individual and on the expression of personal emotions.
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