Essential Questions:

1. Romantics' beliefs of optimism is shown through their writings by the way they express that there is always a place further down the road that will be positive and will have a good outcome no matter what has been done.

2. ROMANTICISM: Was a form of writing during the romantic era and it points emotional feelings over logic or experience. Uses nature, human nature, and the past.

  GOTHIC ROMANTICISM: Is the type of writing that uses gloomy feelings and grotesque characters. Uses mystery, the supernatural, and the dark feelings. Still uses medieval literature like a damsel in distress.

  SOUTHERN GOTHIC ROMANTICISM: Takes place in Southern America. It takes classic Gothic characters and transforms their image to match the rural setting the story would take place in. --- ---

They are similar because they each use nature and unexplainable events to relate with the audience. They each have an element of appeal to a variety of audiences and they all use religion in one way or another. They are different because Romanticism is not dark and is happy, it also uses the past to shape the story. Gothic Romanticism is dark and uses the supernatural to help form the story. Lastly, Southern Gothic Romanticism uses each of the previous styles but turns them in a way to match Southern America.

4. The Southern Gothic movement is a response to the literary movement of the Gothic movement. This is because Southern Gothic is a subgenre to Gothic writing, it takes the writing style of Gothic but changes it to match Southern America. It is a manipulated version of Romantic style of writing because it uses all the key aspects of it but converts it, as I have previously stated, to match Southern America.

5. American culture prompted the dark side to Romanticism because people started craving the dark and mysterious side to the usual love stories they were given.

6.  The writings of that time period influenced todays writings by giving the authors of todays society more leeway on what romanticism is. Many of todays top sellers involve a love story, and some supernatural event that should keep the main characters apart but doesn't. A prime example of this is Twilight or The Hunger Games. Twilight shows this by Bella and Edward falling in love even though Edward is a vampire, Hunger Games shows this by Katniss and Peeta falling in love and both winning the games even though the odds were definitely NOT in their favor. Each of these books may not have been possible if the authors were writing in the style prior to these major literary movements.