Gothic Literature: is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghostes, haunted houses, and Gothic architechure, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.
Further contributions to the Gothic genre were provided in the work of the Romantic poets. Prominent examples include Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci which feature mysteriously fey ladies.
hough it is sometimes asserted that the Gothic had played itself out by the Victorian era and had declined into the cheap horror fiction of the "Penny Blood" or "Penny Dreadful" type, exemplified by the serial novel Varney the Vampire, in many ways Gothic was now entering its most creative phase - even if it was no longer a dominant literary genre (in fact the form's popularity as an established genre had already begun to erode with the success of the historical romance).
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th centery in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industerial Reveloution.It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Entertainment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.
In a basic sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, musicians, as well as potlictial and philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era.
Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in liturature, religion, culture, philosophily, that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century.
One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of well educated people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War and the national division that it both reflected and helped to create. These people, mostly New Englanders, mostly around Boston, were attempting to create a uniquely American body of literature. It was already decades since the Americans had won independence from England. Now, these people believed, it was time for literary independence. And so they deliberately went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing that were clearly different from anything from England, France, Germany, or any other European nation.
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 available.
Work Cited:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
http://www.transcendentalists.com/what.htm
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