Gothic Literature-Gothic Literature, Romanticism, Transcendentalism

Gothic Literature: is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction)
Melodrama and parody were also some of the features that Horace wanted to have readers get across in his novels.
Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic Arc., castles, darkness, death, decay, etc.
Characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains,bandits, maniacs, madwoman, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, the beauty and the beasts, and the devil.
This literary genre found its most natural settings in the very tall buildings of the Gothic style, often spelled "Gothick", to highlight their "medievalness" - castles, mansions, and monasteries, often remote, crumbling, and ruined.

(http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html)
Romanticism doesn't have much to do with the world romantic, although love may occasionally be the subject of romantic art. It is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.
It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages themselves. The Romantic period, began in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe.

(http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/t/transcendentalism.html)

Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas from the literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century.
Transcendentalists are understood by what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they were trying to be different from.In America "transcendentalism" was mostly used in a literary form having a semireligious nature.
The formation of the movement was in 1836 with the establishment of the Transcendental Club of Boston, Massachusetts. The early transcendentalists included the essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, the feminist, s ocial reformer, and author Margaret Fuller, a minister Theodore Parker, and the naturalist and author Henry David Thoreau.