DARKLY ROMANTIC LITERATURE
THE BIBLE, DECAMERONE AND SHAKESPEARE
- 1763
One could trace Dark Romanticism, with all inspiratons and influences, thousands of years back. Even though I like to speculate, my muse wanted to restrict this presentation to the literature after the mystic Christ. Before the gothic era in the 18th century, there are at least three main early influences; the Bible, Decamerone and Shakespeare.
A long time ago God was written alive in the bible. 1600 pages of captivating stories, prayers and songs. The authors spoke of great, sometimes obscure, wonders - angels and demons wandered the earth a long time ago, they said. The characters in the Bible - angels, Jesus, Mary - were popular artistic objects in romantic art and literature. Some theorists even suggests that Romanticism primarily was a matter of praising the christian Lord. Many Dark Romanticists, such as Blake, Cave, Cohen and Melville were inspired by religious symbolism and mysticism. In Decamerone - Boccaccio's collection of short stories - priests, monks and nuns were lecherous and even depraved. Such coarse humour was popular at the time. Even though it was not the same kind of imaginative horror later common in the gothic novels, there are some similarities with the monastery in Lewis' wicked novel, just to mention one example. The stories, sagas, myths, folklore, mystics and saints from the middle ages influenced the romantic and dark romantic authors.
In the 17th century, Shakespeare's influence in literature and art can not be overestimated. Tragic drama - Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet - was the main inspriation in the dark romantic era. The themes are similar - revenge and murder. Shakespeare was the predecessor to Ann Radcliffe.
ROMANTICISM - THE GOTHIC
1764 - 1840
Fred Botting: Gothic - excess, transgression and diffusion. Ambivalence concerning rationality and morality and the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality in a time of political revolutions. The gothic novel reached it's highest popularity in the 1790s, the decade of the French revolution.
Walpole wrote the first gothic novel in 1756 and Maturin perhaps wrote the last in 1820. The Gothic novel from England, the Schauer novel from Germany and the novel noir from France are all names for the same phenomenon - the dawn of dark romanticism. These novels shared many atributes - the castle or the monastery, the villains, the supernatural creatures (monsters, vampires, werewolfs) the hero and the heroine etc. The novels were (over)loaded with strong emotions and violent effects/affects. The drama is extremely pathetic and grotesque, influenced by medieval romances like Don Quixote and medieval folklore. Actually, so many horror novels were written that it is quite impossible to assemble them all here. In England for example, Victorian Bloods were quite popular - amateur short novels sold in the street for a penny. There were almost new stories and new authors every day. Jane Austen is considered a gothic author - the main character in one novel reads too many gothic stories - even though she is not generally associated with horror novels. Many of the most famous authors of the 17th and the 18th century wrote gothic stories. Read more about gothic literature at the literary gothic or the gothic literature page. I strongly recommend Gothic Material for Study - interesting discussions about Lewis, Radcliffe and Shelley. Other important authors of this romantic era were Blake, James, Byron, Keats, Coleridge and Brontë. For an exhaustive definition of Gothic, follow this link. Try Lians page. I also recommend the excellent book Gothic (1996) by Fred Botting.
It might be interesting to distinguish between the novel of horror (Lewis) and the novel of terror (Radcliffe). The terror novel is probably more sophisticated than the horror novel. In the horror novel, we see a corpse while in the terror novel we only smell a corpse. According to me, in the best darkly romantic novels the characters never really experience anything terrible - while we as readers are frightened to death by more sophisticated means. Beckford and Walpole offered the same kind of escape from reality as the romanticists, while later authors such as De Sade offered more interesting readings. In his novels, sinners are not always punished, and they are often forced to sin in order to survive in the horrible times of early industrialism. Gothic has nothing or very little to do with modern horror novels or movies, where the main purpose is not to scare or frighten but to to nauseate, sicken and disgust. In the early 19th century, evil is not always an external supernatural force, but often an internal, perhaps natural force. At this time, the Dark Romantic movement is born. Romanticists such as Keats and Byron are now investigating the darker sides of human life. Villains are not punished, heorines are not married anymore. The world is an uncertain place, the human being a wanderer. Romantic ideals were shadowed, the unity lost.
Fred Botting: ""Distinctions between good and evil, darkness and light, reason and superstition, morality and corruption, real and fantastic, sacred and profane, supernatural and natural, past and present, civlised and barbaric, rational and fanciful were no longer for certain. In Romantic-Gothic writing the individual at the edges of society is the main object."
THE GOTHIC AFTERMATH - FANTASY
science, crime and desire
1841 - 1940
The fascination for horror and terror faded in the middle of of the 19th century. Still one of the most famous darkly romantic stories were written at the end of the century - Stoker's Dracula. At this time, the darkly romantic novels had totally different literary qualities - many of them acknowledged today. Edgar Allan Poe is today recognized as the father of modern horror, detective novels and fantasy. Poe wrote poems and novels according to his philosophy of composition. There is a certain melody in his language, which the gothic authors did not care about, obsessed as they were by effects.
The first fantasy and science fiction novels were written. Authors such as Lovecraft in the 20th century and Hawthorne, somewhat heirs to Hoffmann (1816) and Shelley (1818), both belong in the horror and the fantasy genre. These authors were indeed inspired by the gothic authors but their imagination took the stories one step further. They criticized the scientific progress in early industrialism. In this period, Melville also wrote the mysterious Moby Dick.
MODERNISM - DECADENCE FIN DE SIÈCLE
1850 - 1890
The romantic and the darkly romantic literature was considered overloaded and overstrung in the 1850s. The romantic authors emphasized details - at the expense of entirety and literary qualities. Nothing was chocking after the gothic era. Especially in the 1880s in France some authors introduced a new genre - modernism. These artists, primarily Baudeliare, De Quincey, Huysmans and Gautier, were also called the decadents and sometimes the anti-romanticists (even though they considered themselves romanticists). Their main idea was to portrait decay and destruction - the autumn or winter of the natural world. They searched for the atificial paradise, ate opium and studied the human vices. They even attacked the language itself to destroy it. Horror novels, romantic novels or terror novels did not necessarily take place in a moonlit castle - the streets of London and Paris were even more frightening. It is essential to notice that decadence is not the opposite of progress - decadence is a kind of progress.
At the end of the 19th century, artists were pessimistic as a result of the general crisis in the world. Symbolism, surrealism and many other movements originated in Baudelaire's modernism.
20TH CENTURY
The modernists were popular until the 1920s. After that, the dark romantic movement is harder to distinguish. The gothic novel returns with Reagés and the vampire returns with Rice. Awardwinner Morrison wrote about haunting ghosts. Burroughs continued the modern movement after Baudelaire. In the 1940s, Bowles wrote his sinister novel and Cohen renewed both literature and music in the 60s. Novels by Kafka, Eco and Conrad are foundation stones of modern gothic. Koontz and Stephen King are famous horror authors, but not dark romanticists, though. Fred Botting again: "The 20th century gothic novel describes the alienating bureaucratic and technological reality - terror and horror are located in psychiatric hospitals and criminal subcultures, in scientific, future and intergalactic worlds, in fantasy and the occult."
(from Obsure Wonders: http://hem.passagen.se/hehe/what_is_dark_romanticism.htm)