Gothic Literature

Gothic Literature is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.Gothic_fiction English author, Horace Walpole, was believed to be the founder of Gothic Literature with his novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764.Ann Radcliffe's The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) are cited as the defining parameters of the genre.
http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction
http://www.zittaw.com/canon.htm
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/152/844.jpg
http://considertheevidence.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/.pond/otranto.jpg.w180h235.jpg


The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. Romanticism first orginated in the 18th century in Western Europe. It's the next generation after Gothic times. Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. In the United States, romantic gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). Romanticism isn't just literature. Various forms were found it. Music and painting were a few.
http://75.24.205.227/guenther-history/westernciv2/Romanticism%20and%20Nature.jpg
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/508675/Romanticism


Trancendentalists are what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they were trying to be different from.Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made.Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement. Its first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836.Emerson published his first essay, Nature. Other people who were to believed trancendentalists are Emily Dickison, men like Theodore Parker- and Thomas Wentworth Higginson- who identified themselves as Transcendentalists, also worked for freedom of the slaves and for women's freedom.
http://www.transcendentalists.com/what.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
http://transcendentalismblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834c9da8169e201127936cd6428a4-pi