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Romanticism & the Gothic

Romanticism trusted feeling over argument, and the Gothic gave that trust its furniture: ruined architecture, monstrous creators, doubles who know what you won't admit. Seven books track the mode from its deliberately silly English origin through Germany's uncanniest doubles to an American whale hunt that inherited the sublime whole.

  1. Cover of The Castle of Otranto
    The Castle of Otranto

    Horace Walpole · 1764

    Lvl 3110pp

    Walpole's short, self-consciously absurd novel invents the genre's whole furniture on purpose: crumbling castle, prophecy, and a giant helmet that falls from nowhere.

  2. Cover of The Sorrows of Young Werther
    The Sorrows of Young Werther

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774

    Lvl 3176pp

    Goethe's lovesick young man feels his way to suicide and all Europe wept and imitated him: the movement's founding bestseller, feeling with no argument to answer it.

  3. Cover of The Italian
    The Italian

    Ann Radcliffe · 1797

    Lvl 5424pp

    Radcliffe's Gothic heroine survives an Inquisition-shadowed Italy of secret monks and forbidden inheritance: the genre's terror-as-pleasure machinery at full, elegant speed.

  4. Cover of The Devil's Elixirs
    The Devil's Elixirs

    E. T. A. Hoffmann · 1815

    Lvl 7320pp

    Hoffmann's monk loses himself in a labyrinth of doubles, and the narration itself stops being sure who's telling the story: the German vein at its strangest.

  5. Cover of Frankenstein
    Frankenstein

    Mary Shelley · 1818

    Lvl 4280pp

    Mary Shelley's creature is the sublime and the monstrous in one body: ambition unchecked by feeling, and feeling taking its revenge on the man who wouldn't give it any.

  6. Cover of Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heights

    Emily Brontë · 1847

    Lvl 6352pp

    Emily Brontë's Heathcliff and Catherine aren't a romance so much as weather: the era's most amoral, most annihilating vision of a bond nothing can civilize.

  7. Cover of Moby-Dick
    Moby-Dick

    Herman Melville · 1851

    Lvl 8625pp

    The capstone, and the mode's Atlantic crossing complete: Melville sends the Gothic double and the Romantic sublime to sea after a whale, and comes back with chapters on rope that turn out to be about God.