1)In Romantic writing, stories often have characters with a sense of who they are. These people tend to have a run of luck when it comes to love, drama, and fortune. Though they do find themselves in below optimal situations, they are never nearly in the same degree of despair, danger, or depression as in Gothic Romanticism. (i.e. Annabel Lee, Edgar Allen Poe)
2) Romanticism - "...Painting, music, architecture,
criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period
from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a
rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism
and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the
individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the
personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the
transcendental."
- The Encyclopedia Britannica
Gothic Romanticism - "The Gothic begins with later-eighteenth-century writers' turn to the
past; in the context of the Romantic period, the Gothic is, then, a
type of imitation medievalism. When it was launched in the later
eighteenth
century, The Gothic featured accounts
of terrifying
experiences in ancient castles —
experiences
connected with subterranean dungeons,
secret
passageways, flickering lamps,
screams, moans,
bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards, and
the rest.
By extension, it came to designate the
macabre,
mysterious, fantastic, supernatural,
and, again,
the terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying,
in literature more generally. Closer to the
present, one sees the Gothic pervading Victorian
literature (for example, in the novels of Dickens
and the Brontës), American fiction (from
Poe and Hawthorne through Faulkner), and of
course the films, television, and videos of
our own (in this respect, not-so-modern) culture."
-The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Southern Gothic Romanticism - "The Southern Gothic movement in literature brings the atmosphere and sensibilities of the Gothic, a genre originating in late 18th century England, to the American South. As early Gothic writers used the genre in part to criticize what they saw as the moral blindness of the medieval era, so Southern Gothic writers deal with their own past through Gothic
tropes. This genre is unusual as a genre in that it is significantly
limited to a certain geographical space. Many of the most notable
American authors of the 20th century wrote in this tradition, and the
genre can be seen in music and film as well."
-Niki Foster, Wisegeek
3) Not many movements had been this impacting in altering the standard for literary acceptance, the only other movements changing our views on anything that affected us were the Renaissance and The Great Awakening, which were movements of Art, Science, and religion, not of solely literary reform.
4) In America we see the good and the bad on a regular basis, whether we acknowledge either of them is up to perspective, standpoint, and preconception of our life ahead of us. Some of us only see the good, they never expect anything bad to happen, they always see the bright side, but when things do go wrong it affects the harder than anyone. Then, we have people who only see the dirty side of humanity, they're cynical and mistrusting of any good-will sent their direction, they fail to enjoy the nice look of things because they're too busy scrutinizing the underside of the rug. Then you have those who look at facts and see both good and bad and weigh things accordingly, but they become emotionally disenfranchised from any form of empathy.
In retrospect, Romanticism may have been just too open-endedly chipper for some people, so to complement this, they created the tales of pure despair and agony that can plague one's life just as the good may redeem it.
"To know beauty, one must first know the grotesque." -Leonardo Da Vinci
5) Today, some people look back at the works of Edgar Allen Poe with a sense of worship. Gothic culture has expanded, from just art and literature, to an entire writhing reveling culture of the things that make our lives dark and archaically insane, and many Gothic authors bled all the way into the 20th century still holding the original conceptual theme of Gothic Romanticism.
(i.e. H. P. Lovecraft)
