This paper examines the differences between the Romantic, the Gothic, and the Dark Romantic literary genres by looking at the manifestations of the trope of the double within the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The notion of the individual versus that of individualism helps highlight the disparity between Gothicism and Dark Romance, and the implications that these differences hold.

Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a celebratory poet, he is nevertheless also in part a writer of the Dark Romantic.

<p>This thesis approaches the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne from a narratological paradigm, arguing that metafiction is one of the primary elements of Hawthorne’s style and literary project as a Romantic author. Metafiction informs his themes, characters and aesthetics as Hawthorne is majorly concerned with bridging the gap between author and reader, text and physical book, and ultimately, the imaginary and the real. Hawthorne is incessant in his assertions about his work being authored works of fiction, and becomes concerned about readers properly receiving his fiction as authored literary surface. Engaging with and incorporating the work of major literary theorists such as Frye, Booth, Genette and Todorov—as well as new, emergent critics of Hawthorne—this study carefully examines his major novels, a number of his tales and sketches, and his paratextual materials. Metafiction is rarely considered in much of the scholarship discussing Hawthorne’s style, and is a convenient way of unifying many aspects of his style that have been previously fractured, including the distance and delicacy of his narration and voice, his experiments in genre, and his techniques of framing and diegesis.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)