Over the years, we've read quite a bit of nineteenth-century Romantic literature. While some of it doesn't seem too dark (think our poetry unit last year with Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and all those poems about love and nature), a subsect of the writing of the period was most certainly focused on corruption, death, and the evil aspects of human nature and life. Critics have called this part of the Romantic literary movement, "Dark Romanticism." Famous writers that we've read include Edgar Allen Poe ("The Raven"), Herman Melville ("Bartleby the Scrivener"), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Emily Dickinson, and Charles Baudelaire.
Romanticism as a whole emphasizes the irrationality of human nature--emotion over reason and premeditated decisions. Over time, it branched into two fields of thought: those who thought humans naturally gravitated towards good (the Transcendentalists) and the pessimists who believed humans were basically bad (the Dark Romantics). Dark Romanticism emphasized the corruption and sin of humanity--one of the darkest parts of it was Gothic literature (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).
Source: https://americanliterature.com/dark-romanticism-study-guide
Source: https://americanliterature.com/dark-romanticism-study-guide
1 comment:
Lainey's post definitely reminded about my trip to Europe with Dr. Vaccaro this summer. Specifically, I couldn't help but think about Westminister Abbey and how it has buried so many of the Romantic authors noted in Lainey's post. That definitely stands as a symbol of how important their works were and are and how poems like the ones we have read and are reading were revolutionary at the times they were written. Many poets, specifically Baudelaire, was ahead of his time, depicting vivid imagery and developing a poetry that has transformed itself in its own separate realm today: that of prose. Unfortunately, there are no photos allowed at "the Abbey,"so I will not share any here, but it most definitely was a place that reminded me of the lasting influence Romanticism has had on our society.
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