Dark Romanticism

Dark romanticism (often conflated with Gothicism) is a literary subgenre of Romanticism. From its very inception in the late 18th century, Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity had been dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime and shady atmosphere, with the options of ghosts and ghouls, 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’’.

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. 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.

Elements of dark romanticism were a perennial possibility within the broader international movement Romanticism, in both literature and art.

Like romanticism itself, dark romanticism arguably began in Germany, with writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann,Christian Heinrich Spiess, and Ludwig Tieck – 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.

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