4. Gothic Romance, the specifics of the genre.

Gothic romance novels or stories were popular in the 18th and 19 century. This was a very interesting type of romance genre which was mainly governed by mystery. They were known to touch on the supernatural and those who have a liking for horror found them especially entertaining. Their setting was a hall mark of haunted castles and medieval ruins. According to Wikipedia, Gothic romance fiction is a style of writing that combines romance and horror. This is a combination that can best be termed as wicked passion of horror. The man who is believed to be the inventor of the genre is the author English man Horace Walpole. This is evident in his Gothic fiction novel of romance which he released in 1764. The famous novel is known as 'the castle of Otranto'. Readers have stood out to love this kind of writing and mainly because there is a pleasure that comes from reading about great terror and fear. Adding a good love story to the equation has only made the style more impacting to the readers.

There are so many Gothic romance novels that have been written since 1764. They come with features that are unmistakable. Some of the most common features of a Gothic romance novel include the following. The first most recognized feature is terror. This is a terror that is both psychological and physical. When reading the stories, you are bound to be captivated by terror which keeps the fans electrified as they read. The other feature is mystery. It comes in form of the supernatural where you find ghosts and haunted houses. The fiction was birthed from deep believes in supernatural things. There are many people who do not regard the fiction as just fantasy. For example, many readers believe that a house can be haunted by ghosts. Some of these believes have proved to be ingrained in society and it is almost like they are part of us. There are those who get so scared while reading the stories while others find great pleasure in them.

Gothic romance novels will also have other features like death, darkness, decay, madness, secrets and hereditary curses. Many people have labeled the literature as demonic and satanic. This is mainly because the stories are associated with so much evil and vices. However, despite what others think, Gothic novels on romance have continued to thrill many eager fans all over the world. Most people appreciate the stories of love and how triumph is able to play out amid dark adventure. For more information about the Gothic love stories and the Gothic culture, you can go online and, you will find out more. You will also find information on the development of the literature. This information is pretty exciting and, you will get to learn new things. Many novels of such genres continue to be produced. There are those novels which are very popular and, one good example is the novel by Mary Shelley called 'Frankenstein'. This is a horror story that has stuck in the minds of many a fan.

5. William Blake. The correlation between “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”.

Critical controversy surrounds the categorization of Blake's poetry in the Romantic period. Harold S. Pagliaro suggests that Blake not only participated in the Romantic era's preoccupation with mortality, but actually went beyond most of his contemporaries in embracing vulnerability to death. According to Pagliaro, Blake considered the world “death-laden, filled with intimidating foes, deadly Tygers, hypocritical smiles, and constricting social and religious systems that reduce life.” The critic believes it was the aim of the Songs to meet the challenge presented by such a dismal world view. Some scholars, though, reject the notion that Blake was a Romantic poet at all, and instead situate his work within the tradition of an earlier literary period. Heather Glen contends that Blake's text is not, as is often claimed, an experimental work. “In presentation and subject-matter, Blake's Songs are closer to late eighteenth-century children's verse than to anything else in the period,” writes Glen. However, Blake's verses differ from the usual children's poetry, according to Glen, in their failure to provide a strong authorial voice conveying the message young readers should glean from the poems. Jon Mee, acknowledging the work's originality, also maintains that the songs are modeled on earlier literature, but insists that they “often work by mimicking familiar forms and arousing expectations which they go on to frustrate.” Martin Price contends that the association of the Innocence poems with verse for children has led some critics to dismiss them entirely or to treat them as ironic foreshadowings of the Experience poems, a position he rejects. He asserts that the poems of the first section are valuable in their own right and should first be examined in isolation from the second section. “Only when we grant Innocence its proper value does the full dialectical force of the two contrary states become clear,” claims Price. Many scholars, including Glen, nevertheless defend the contention that the poems of the Innocence sequence contain an element of irony that undercuts their pastoral quality. Harold Bloom, too, refers to Blake's use of “innocence” as an “equivocal term” and suggests that the songs in the first section exhibit an “ambiguity of tone.”

Controversy has also raged over the organization of the work and the relationship between the two sections. Many critics have studied the obvious dialectical pairings of individual poems, such as the contrasting versions of “Nurse's Song” or “The Chimney-Sweeper” in each section. Others see affinities between poems that do not have similar titles, such as the cluster “Laughing Song,” “The Little Black Boy” and “The Voice of the Ancient Bard.” Attempts to establish a direct correspondence across the board between the two sections have proven fruitless, however. Donald A. Dike maintains that “Blake was too fine an artist to pair off in detail all the poems in the sequences; to get what he was after, it was enough to do this with a few.” K. E. Smith suggests that attempts to match up the individual songs are complicated by the fact that Blake himself changed the order of the poems several times, moving some from Innocence to Experience. Smith suggests that Blake was “constantly highlighting different paths through the innocent world,” rather than pointing to one final, ideal arrangement of the poems.

Glen has examined those pieces—such as “London”—that deal with social problems and notes that the self-consciousness of Blake's poetic voice sets him apart from his contemporaries. The poem's speaker, in relating the deplorable conditions associated with urban life, “does not assume a position of righteous indignation: from the very beginning he recognizes his own implication in that which he sees.” The result is not a moral attitude that exposes and protests against social problems, but rather a “profound uneasiness” on the part of both the poem's speaker and the reader. Mee also notes Blake's complex approach to social problems in the songs, contrasting “The Chimney Sweeper” with Mary Alcock's poem “The Chimney-Sweeper's Complaint.” As Mee sees it, Alcock's “reader is not called upon to consider his or her role in the system of child labour,” whereas “Blake's reader is directly implicated in what is happening.” Scholars agree that, although Blake participated in the contemporary discourse on social problems, his approach was original and far less consoling for the reader than that of other writers.