Dark Romanticism is a literary sensibility that emerged from the broader Romantic movement. While sharing the main movement's fascination with emotion, individualism, and the supernatural, Dark Romantics took a deeply pessimistic view of the world. Rather than seeing nature as a source of divine truth and redemption, they depicted it as a dark, decaying, and mysterious force. Instead of celebrating human potential, their works explore humanity's capacity for sin, guilt, madness, and self-destruction. The core belief of Dark Romanticism is that humans are inherently fallible and prone to evil.

This sensibility is often conflated with Gothicism , but there is a key distinction. Gothic literature typically uses external sources of horror (such as haunted castles, monsters, and physical threats) to create suspense and terror. Dark Romanticism, while often using Gothic settings, is more concerned with internal, psychological horror. Its focus is on the darkness within the human soul, exploring themes of obsession, profound guilt, and the perverse nature of man.

Dark Romanticism is most closely associated with American literature. Key figures include Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels like The Scarlet Letter explore the psychological torment of sin and guilt in Puritan society; Herman Melville, whose masterpiece Moby-Dick portrays a captain's obsessive and self-destructive quest against a malevolent natural world; and Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories and poems are masterful studies of madness, decay, and the irrational impulses that drive individuals to acts of horror. In Europe, the strange and supernatural tales of German author E. T. A. Hoffmann and the philosophical horror of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also exemplify this darker romantic sensibility.