Dark Romanticism In The Romantic Era

Dark Romanticism evolves from works of the Romantic Period (1798-1870) with characteristics of horror fiction and death. It is taken as a reaction of the Transcendental Movement, which originated abreast the Romantic Period from 1830 to 1860. Known writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne found that the ideas displayed in the Transcendental works were idealistic and rose-colored, as a result, they opt to alter these works adding their own element hence this was the birth of the subgenre.

To explore more about this subgenre we have three Americans mentioned above that are considered as major Dark Romantics authors.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. He was an American writer

He took into consideration many elements to ensure his works reached a point where the reader would feel awestruck and could feel the many feelings pictured in the writings. Poe’s characters and stories were represented often by the rejection of the rational, a characteristic of the Romantic era, exchanging it with intuition and emotions. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", considered the first detective story, Poe introduces us to Auguste Dupin. Dupin, throughout the story, tries to constantly think like the criminal, following his intuition in order to resolve the crime. The display of emotions in his stories is what draws the attention of the reader. Most of the narrations like in "The Black Cat" give a sense of irrationality. Hatred, melancholy, woe and distress, his characters rely more on the human side showing their mental state, taking his stories to have a bigger impact on the reader’s minds. This is attributed to the period where his works were written, as stated earlier. Poe’s usage of resources like dark atmospheres, messing around with the time in which the story is represented, this was most commonly used to alter reader’s ideas of the perfection and the beauty and divert them more to the contemporary side. He liked to mix different settings with times who were most likely to confuse the reader’s perception of it, making his stories more suspenseful. Poe’s characters had something in between, parts or their full names weren’t ever mentioned. He believed the real emphasis should be put in the emotions of the character, not in the identity. This is the case of "The Pit and the Pendulum" where the base of the story is the representation of characters fears not knowing the name of the same. Lastly, the real sense of Poe’s writings was the expectation of the unexpected. He