Dark Romanticism

Dark Romanticism is a strand of the broader nineteenth-century Romantic movement, centered in the United States and associated above all with Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, that reacted against the optimistic faith in human goodness, nature and self-reliance found in contemporaries such as the Transcendentalists. Where mainstream Romanticism generally emphasized nature's benevolence and the individual's capacity for moral and spiritual improvement, Dark Romantic writers explored sin, guilt, psychological instability, the supernatural and human fallibility, often set against Gothic imagery of decay, isolation and the uncanny. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Poe's tales and poems of horror and obsession, and Melville's Moby-Dick and shorter fiction are its defining works, and the strand is often read as a bridge between eighteenth-century Gothic fiction and the psychological realism and horror fiction of later American literature.