Characteristics of Light Romanticism/Transcendentalism
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Values feeling and intuition over reason
- Expresses faith in inner experience and power of the imagination
- Shuns artificiality of civilization and seeks solitude in unspoiled
- Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication
- Champions individual freedom and worth of the individual
- Contemplates Nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and moral
- Finds beauty and truth in exotic places, supernatural realms, and the
- Seeks poetry as one of the highest expressions of human imagination
Characteristics of Dark Romanticism/Gothic Literature
- Has a darker vision of the human experience
- Is preoccupied with strange or sinister inner experience
- Sometimes contains "grotesque" or very strange characters--characters acting in abnormal or irrational ways
- Describes bizarre situations
- Sometimes contains violent actions
- Draws on the shadowy region in the imagination where the fantastic, the demonic, and the insane reside
- Sometimes contains elements of the dark supernatural return (elements of Puritanism revived)
- Creates sinister atmosphere and mood through varied elements of fiction--characterization, dialogue, setting, symbolism, and description
- Contains elements of horror, dread, and fear
- Often emphasizes family curses and mystery
- Often deals with past eras, using those eras as symbols of darkness and oppression
- Contains elements of death, decay, and grief
- Sometimes set in haunted or decaying locations or unusual communities
- Contains word choice and description that create an unsettling mood
- Sometimes has a love theme
- Often has themes of fear of the unknown or the growth of evil
