1. The Dark Romantics: Gothicism

2. THE DARK ROMANTICS
opposed the optimism of the Transcendentalists

3. Subject Matter
The conflict between good and evil

4. Subject Matter
The psychological effects of guilt and sin, madness and derangement in the human psyche

5. Influence
Puritanism—original sin, the innate depravity of human beings, and predestination (elect and damned)

6. Gothicism
Used to describe a scary novel from the Romantic Period

7. Gothicism
Setting— Bleak remote places, often medieval Gothic castle or cathedral with its sliding doors, and subterranean passages (Scooby Doo).

8. GOTHIC SETTINGS Used to evoke fear
Places of sinister or supernatural events

9. Gothicism Uses death and decay as topics
Plots involve macabre or violent events

10. GOTHIC TRAITS Includes any fiction that creates
a haunting atmosphere, strange macabre events, such as live burials, horrifying tortures, mesmerism (hypnotism), and resurrection of human corpses

11. Gothicism
Poe used them as symbolic device—the workings of the human mind.

12. The Authors
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe

13. Additional Thoughts for Analyzing Poe

14. Europe vs. America
Poe depicted Europe and Europeans, especially wealthy or noble Europeans, as decadent, twisted, evil, exhausted, weak, and immoral. Americans–at least those who don’t emulate European models–are fresh, strong, vigorous and new. There are many exceptions to this generalization, but careful readers of Poe should not ignore his role and creating an American identity in literature.

15. Detective Fiction
Poe invented the modern American detective story when he wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Here again, Poe organizes his ideas using an opposition, this time between crime (which is not just immoral but also passionate, illogical, careless) and punishment (which is dispassionate, logical, and scrupulous). - from discussion by Dr. Giroux

16. Faculty Psychology
Views the mind as a collection of separate modules or faculties assigned to various mental tasks. The view is explicit in the psychological writings of the medieval scholastic theologians

17. Empiricism
Is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism, and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or traditions

18. Grotesque Stories
These are the horror stories. They are often bloody and gory. Readers are frightened by the brutality of man.

19. Arabesque Style
These are the tales of terror. They forego the blood and gore of the grotesque and instead focus on the complexities of the human mind.
* Poe did not separate his stories into categories, and scholars have struggled to do so