Essential Questions

1) Romantics display their love and belief of optimism and individuality in the plot line of their stories.  A character usually goes off looking for something that he feels is missing in his life and believes that no matter how long it takes he will accomplish his goal.  He journeys to the most remote places imaginable alone, making his own choices and dealing with whatever consequences can find him on his search.  Over time, how long depends on how much the author likes the character, he will find what he was looking for, usually realizing that it was right under his nose the whole time.

2) Romanticism is a style of living, believing and looking at things, events and people.  As sub-categories to the genre of Romanticism Gothic Romanticism and Southern Gothic Romanticism have these ideals in them.  However they have darker settings and characters and deal more with human frailty than escape from reality.  Southern Gothic Romanticism typically places its setting in the southern potion of the United States while Gothic Romanticism has its setting in medieval-like places all over the world.

3) Authors wanted their stories and themes to hit closer to home so they moved the setting from far away to within the states.  The idea that we are capable and often doing what the characters in small towns do is frightening but we needed that.  We loved Romanticism to much just to let it drop off the radar so the authors took elements of horror placed them in the book and used ethos, pathos, and logos to convince us of what was happening much like the Puritan authors and pastors of colonial days.  They merged the old with the new and created something that the world simply could not put down because it appeal  to both their sense of humanity and amorality.

4) Americans long for a sense of wrongness something we can talk about and make fun of that will make us feel better abut ourselves.  Why else do we crave the court cases with no definite solution or the ones that are pre-determined guilty and are so bloody we feel both hate, and sadness in the same moment.  We got tired of the easy answers and wanted something harder, more realer.  The soppy goodness of the Disney characters was getting to us.  We wanted, needed something to keep up at night squirming with fear and wonder, pondering the moral rightness or wrongness of the characters.  We needed something new and unexplored.  Looking around we still crave that element of unknown in our books, no matter what other people try to tell us.

5) The sense of individuality instilled in the American people by those early Romantic authors keeps present authors on their toes trying to find something the public likes.  But just as we were altered by those early authors so are the authors of the present.  I, as I write books and poems, find myself writing things I didn't know I could write and liking it because it accurately sums up my feelings were other, simpler words were failing.  I choose to write what feels right and not what feels wrong on wording or emotion and that's what's hard for me when righting multiple character stories.  I have difficulty giving them all different personalities, making them individuals, giving them the free-will our founding fathers looked for so diligently.  Has the writing of the past changed the writing of the future?  The answer is yes and it has changed so much more.  In writing we stray away from the strictly informational books the puritans liked toward works of the heart and mind and soul.  We as a society are different because of the early Romantics.  Now what we must do is honor our heritage and the things that have made us who we are.