Dystopia of the Romantic Ideals in Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe: an Exploration of the Impossibility of an Ideal World

This work seeks to explore the dystopia and inversion of the Romantic ideals as seen in the works of Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe. The works of these writers demonstrate a strain of writing opposed to the Romantic stream, as the macabre and dark supernatural world usurps the beautiful and idyllic Romantic world, where the writer is the poet-prophet, who worships nature through his works. The splendour of the world bathed in celestial light is replaced by a world where a sense of terrible foreboding and doom predominates. The fearful aesthetic of Radcliffe and Poe depicts a labyrinthine world where attempts to achieve self-realization are thwarted. The Romantics exalted the poet as a gifted creature who could discover the meaning of life through work that focused on nature and the way it shaped the psychology and emotions of the individual. The Gothic artists explored the fatalistic side of life when even the narrator became an unreliable one as he failed to understand the phenomenon that confronted him. This work would be a valuable asset for readers exploring the Gothic and its inherent contradictions.