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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dark Romanticism | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Romanticism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:35:17.269786+00:00 | kb-cron |
Delacroix is usually considered as the founder of the Romantic movement in French painting throughout the nineteenth century. His painting technique – full of rich, agitated brushwork and throbbing with vibrant color – expressed the movement's concern for emotion, exoticism, and the sublime, and his life and work embodied the movement's concern for passion, exoticism, and the sublime.
== Timeline == The American Renaissance (literature) was between 1840 and 1860. This included Dark Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Since it allowed for the study of gloomy ideas, writing, and topics, Dark Romanticism had a huge effect on American literature. Dark Romanticism began as a response to the Transcendental movement of the mid-nineteenth century. This was a mental shift in thinking from rigid religious Puritan thought to a dark, immoral point of view. People were disinterested in optimism when they considered their sin and human nature. Authors and artists were not afraid to express their sinister side. Authors began to investigate man's wicked nature even before 1840. 1809 – Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe is probably one of the most influential writers of this time. His themes focused on human sin and the evil in man. Herman Melville – another influential writer, but he is completely different in his writing from Poe and Hawthorne. His themes focus on "the truths of ragged edges" From 1840 to the late 1870s, Dark Romanticism dominated literature and art. The primary element employed was symbolism. They would symbolize man's bad side and "study human nature's difficulties." Artists sought to show how evil, rather than virtue, consumes people, and how individual acts lead to self-destruction.
== 18th-/19th-century movements in national literatures == Elements of Dark Romanticism were a perennial possibility within the broader international movement of Romanticism, in both literature and art.
=== Germany === Dark Romanticism arguably began in Germany, with writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Ludwig Tieck, and also pre-Romantic figure of Christian Heinrich Spiess, — though their emphasis on existential alienation, the demonic in sex, and the uncanny, was offset at the same time by the more homely cult of Biedermeier. Like the Gothic novel, Schwarze Romantik is a genre based on the terrifying side of the Middle Ages, and frequently feature the same elements (castles, ghost, monster, etc.). However, Schauerroman's key elements are necromancy and secret societies, and it is remarkably more pessimistic than the English Gothic novel. All those elements are the basis for Friedrich Schiller's unfinished novel The Ghost-Seer (1786–1789). The motive of secret societies is also present in Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1791–1794) and Christian August Vulpius' The History of Rinaldo Rinaldini (1798). Benedikte Naubert's novel Hermann of Unna (1788) is seen as being very close to the Schauerroman genre. Other early authors and works included Christian Heinrich Spiess, with his works Das Petermännchen (1793), Der alte Überall und Nirgends (1792), Die Löwenritter (1794), and Hans Heiling, vierter und letzter Regent der Erd- Luft- Feuer- und Wasser-Geister (1798); Heinrich von Kleist's short story "Das Bettelweib von Locarno" (1797); and Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (1797) and Der Runenberg (1804).
==== Jüngere Romantik ==== For two decades, the most famous author of Gothic literature in Germany was the polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann. His novel The Devil's Elixirs (1815) was influenced by Lewis's The Monk and even mentions it. The novel also explores the motive of Doppelgänger, the term coined by another German author and supporter of Hoffmann, Jean Paul, in his humorous novel Siebenkäs (1796–1797). Aside from Hoffmann and de la Motte Fouqué, three other important authors from the era were Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (The Marble Statue, 1818), Ludwig Achim von Arnim (Die Majoratsherren, 1819), and Adelbert von Chamisso (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 1814). After them, Wilhelm Meinhold wrote The Amber Witch (1838) and Sidonia von Bork (1847). The last work from the German writer Theodor Storm, The Rider on the White Horse (1888), uses Gothic motives and themes.
=== Britain === 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. Dark Romanticism is characterized by stories of personal torment, social outcasts, and usually offers commentary on whether the nature of man will save or destroy him. Some authors of English and Irish horror fiction, such as Bram Stoker and Daphne du Maurier, follow in this lineage.
=== American === The American form of this sensibility centered on the writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, with Charles Brockden Brown being a predecessor. As opposed to the perfectionist beliefs of Transcendentalism, these darker contemporaries emphasized human fallibility and proneness to sin and self-destruction, as well as the difficulties inherent in attempts at social reform.
=== France ===
The 19th-century fantastique literature after 1830 was dominated by the influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and then by that of Edgar Allan Poe. French authors such as Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, 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.
== See also ==
== References ==
== Further reading == Galens, David, ed. (2002) Literary Movements for Students Vol. 1. Levin, Harry. The Power of Blackness (1958) Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony (1933) Mullane, Janet and Robert T. Wilson, eds. (1989) Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism Vols. 1, 16, 24.
== External links ==
Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism Journal The Gothic as an Aspect of American Romanticism