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Modern Romanticism: Dark Fantasy, the Gothic, and the Persistence of the Romantic Imagination

Modern Romanticism — sometimes called Neoromanticism or the persistence of Romantic sensibility in the modern period — describes the remarkable continuation of Romantic themes, forms, and concerns in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. The Romantic hero, the Romantic vision of nature, the Romantic interest in the supernatural, the Romantic cult of the artist-genius, the Romantic idea of the great work of art as a window onto a deeper reality — all of these remain powerful and pervasive in contemporary culture, from the fantasy novel to the science-fiction film, from the Gothic television series to the brooding detective of contemporary crime fiction, from the dark and atmospheric music of black metal to the lush, Romantic scores of contemporary cinema.

This page offers a structured introduction to modern Romanticism — its origins, its major forms, and its long persistence into our own time.

The Persistence of the Romantic Tradition

It is one of the striking facts of modern cultural history that the Romantic movement, supposedly succeeded by Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, has never actually gone away. In the 1890s, even as the Realists and Naturalists were proclaiming the death of Romanticism, the late Romantics and the early Symbolists were developing new versions of the Romantic vision. In the 1920s and 1930s, even as the modernists were proclaiming a clean break with the past, the writers of high fantasy (William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, J.R.R. Tolkien) were writing deeply Romantic works. In the post-World-War-II period, the persistence of the Romantic tradition has been even more visible: in the gothic novels of the Brontë tradition, in the fantasy of Tolkien and his successors, in the science fiction of Asimov and Clarke and Le Guin, in the lyric poetry of the Confessional poets and their successors, in the dark fantasy of contemporary writers, in the haunting music of contemporary film composers, and in the broader “Romantic” sensibility of contemporary popular culture.

Dark Romanticism

A particularly important strand of modern Romanticism is dark romanticism — the persistence of the dark, the Gothic, the uncanny, the supernatural, the brooding, the violent, and the taboo as central themes in modern literature and culture. The dark Romantic tradition runs from the early American Romantics (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) through the late-nineteenth-century Decadents and Symbolists (Baudelaire, Huysmans, Wilde) through the twentieth-century Southern Gothic (Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers) and the gothic novels of contemporary writers (Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates) into the contemporary popular culture of vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, and brooding anti-heroes.

Modern Fantasy and the Inherited World

The great tradition of modern fantasy — from William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and J.R.R. Tolkien through the post-Tolkien fantasy of Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett, George R.R. Martin, and many others — is one of the most visible and most popular expressions of modern Romanticism. The fantasy genre, with its medieval settings, its hero-figures, its struggle between good and evil, its deep interest in mythology, language, and the past, is in many ways a continuation of the Romantic project by other means.

The great Tolkienian inheritance of the modern fantasy tradition is, in particular, a deeply Romantic inheritance: the long, the slow, the meditative, the melancholy, the sense of the passing of a great age, the cult of the heroic individual, the belief in a deeper order behind the world of appearance. Tolkien himself thought of his work as a kind of mythology “for England,” in conscious imitation of the national-mythological project of the Romantics.

Science Fiction and the Romantic Inheritance

The great tradition of modern science fiction is also, in many ways, a continuation of the Romantic project. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the founding text of science fiction, is also a central work of the Gothic novel and a deeply Romantic work. The great twentieth-century science fiction writers — H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and many others — have continued, in different ways, the Romantic interest in the human future, the human imagination, the human place in the cosmos, the great political and ethical questions, and the deep resources of the human mind.

The Romantic conviction that the human being is a creature of unlimited potential — for good and for evil — has been a powerful resource for modern science fiction. So has the Romantic interest in the natural world, in the dark side of human nature, in the struggle of the heroic individual against the forces of tyranny and conformity. The great modern dystopias — Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 — are all in their different ways descendants of the Romantic political vision.

The Romantic Vision in Cinema

The cinema, perhaps more than any other modern art form, has been deeply indebted to the Romantic tradition. The great films of the silent era — Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, F.W. Murnau’s Faust and Nosferatu, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc — are deeply Romantic works. The Hollywood cinema of the studio era drew heavily on the Romantic inheritance, in the work of directors like John Ford, David Lean, and William Wyler, and in the great Romantic scores of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, and others. The contemporary cinema of Christopher Nolan, Terrence Malick, Peter Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro continues the Romantic inheritance in powerful new ways.

The Romantic Vision in Popular Music

The Romantic tradition has also been powerful in modern popular music, especially in the genres that emphasize atmosphere, narrative, and emotional intensity. The blues, the ballad tradition, the singer-songwriter tradition, the heavy metal tradition, the gothic rock tradition, the dark ambient tradition, and many other modern popular forms all draw, in different ways, on the Romantic inheritance. The great Romantic composers — Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss — have been major influences on the modern film and popular music traditions.

The Continuing Power of the Romantic Imagination

The persistence of the Romantic tradition into the present day is a striking fact of modern cultural history. The Romantic ideas about the human being, the human imagination, the human place in the natural world, the human capacity for creativity, and the human struggle against the forces of darkness and tyranny — these remain powerful and pervasive in contemporary culture. To study modern Romanticism is to study one of the great continuities of Western culture, and to understand the cultural background of much of our own time.