Dark romanticism

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For the album by Primordial, see Dark Romanticism (album).
See also: Romantic literature in English

Edgar Allan Poe is among the most well-known authors of Dark Romanticism
Dark romanticism (often conflated with Gothicism) is a literary subgenre of Romanticism. From its very
inception in the late eighteenth century, Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity had been
dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime, the grotesque, and the
irrational. The name Dark Romanticism was given to this form by the literary theorist Mario Praz in his
lengthy study of the genre published in 1930, The Romantic Agony.[1][2]
According to the critic G. R. Thompson, the Dark Romantics adapted images
of anthropomorphized evil in the form of Satan, devils, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and ghouls as
emblematic of human nature.[3] Thompson sums up the characteristics of the subgenre, writing:
Fallen man's inability fully to comprehend haunting reminders of another, supernatural realm
that yet seemed not to exist, the constant perplexity of inexplicable and vastly metaphysical
phenomena, a propensity for seemingly perverse or evil moral choices that had no firm or fixed
measure or rule, and a sense of nameless guilt combined with a suspicion the external world
was a delusive projection of the mind--these were major elements in the vision of man the Dark
Romantics opposed to the mainstream of Romantic thought.[4]

Contents
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118th and 19th century movements in different national literatures

220th century influence

3Criticism

4See also

5References

6Further reading

7External links

18th and 19th century movements in different national

literatures[edit]
Elements of dark romanticism were a perennial possibility within the broader international
movement Romanticism, in both literature and art.[5]
Like romanticism itself, dark romanticism arguably began in Germany, with writers such as E. T. A.
Hoffmann,[6] Christian Heinrich Spiess, and Ludwig Tieck though their emphasis on existential
alienation, the demonic in sex, and the uncanny,[7] was offset at the same time by the more homely
cult of Biedermeier.[8]
British authors such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and John William
Polidori, who are frequently linked to Gothic fiction, are also sometimes referred to as Dark
Romantics.[9] Their tales and poems commonly feature outcasts from society, personal torment and
uncertainty as to whether the nature of man will bring him salvation or destruction.[citation needed] Some
Victorian authors of English horror fiction, such as Bram Stoker and Daphne du Maurier, follow in
this lineage.
The American form of this sensibility centered on the writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.[10] As opposed to the perfectionist beliefs of Transcendentalism,
these darker contemporaries emphasized human fallibility and proneness to sin and selfdestruction, as well as the difficulties inherent in attempts at social reform.[11]
French authors such as Jules Barbey dAurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur
Rimbaud echoed the dark themes found in the German and English literature. Baudelaire was one
of the first French writers to admire Edgar Allan Poe, but this admiration or even adulation of Poe
became widespread in French literary circles in the late 19th century.

20th century influence[edit]

Twentieth-century existential novels have also been linked to dark romanticism,[12] as too have
the sword and sorcery novels of Robert E. Howard.[13]

Criticism[edit]
Northrop Frye pointed to the dangers of the demonic myth making of the dark side of romanticism
as seeming to provide all the disadvantages of superstition with none of the advantages of
religion.[14]

See also[edit]
Novels portal

lvares de Azevedo

Danse Macabre

Doppelgnger

Grotesque

Nerval

Noite na Taverna

Satanism

Ultra-Romanticism