As for the following segment, the main sources are, the previously mentioned Romantic Gothic and The Gothic Text by Marshall Brown.
Around 1800, the so-called "dark romance" replaces the early-romantic uprising mood in Germany. Ludwig Tieck’s “Mondbeglänzten Zaubernächte” gives a rather gloomy, sarcastic and broken view of the situation.
The origin of the Gothic Romanticism is found in the English Gothic novel: novels such as "Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole (1764) or Anne Radcliffe 's "The Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794).
It broadens the scope of the general romanticism to the irrational: It turns to the absent - excessive, scary - demonic, Satanic and fantastic.
The Romantics focused more on the individual and their feelings. Some of those
…show more content…
People began to question the existence of God or a higher power and Gothic novels allowed writers and readers likewise to delve and analyze all those unexplored, unknown territories of life and beyond, through storytelling.
To sum up, Gothic literature makes use of all that is valued by the romantics, such as intense emotions and aedthetics but has an almost sinister side.
In addition to decadently aesthetic features, Gothic Romanticism also contains nihilistic features: the hold, handed down values are lost, dark, melancholic resigned moods. In the same way, morbidly absurd inclinations, the so-called "night sides" of the human mind as well as fantastic-ghostly and grotesque are discussed.
In addition, this tendency, especially in the trivial literature, with its partly amoral-abnormal theme (incest, necrophilia), finds two manifestations: the horror romance and the ghost story.
The discovery of horror as a source of pleasure and beauty did not remain reactionless to the concept of beauty itself. For the romantics, beauty increased precisely through qualities which seem to contradict it, namely, the features of the