Darkness
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Dark may refer to:
- Having an absolute or (more often) relative lack of light.
- The room was too dark for reading.
- Dull or deeper in hue; not bright or light.
- My sister's hair is darker than mine.
- Her skin grew dark with a suntan.
- Hidden, secret
- "Meantime we shall express our darker purpose" (Shakespeare, King Lear, i 1).
- Without moral or spiritual light; sinister, malign.
- Conducive to hopelessness; depressing or bleak
- The Great Depression was a dark time.
- Lacking progress in science or the arts; said of a time period
- With emphasis placed on the unpleasant aspects of life; said of a work of fiction, a work of nonfiction presented in narrative form or a portion of either
- The ending of this book is rather dark.
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Dark culture
The best description of dark culture, or the dark side of human nature is in descriptions of psychopaths and in accounts of true crime.
An interest in dark culture began for the first time consciously by the Decadent movement. Paul Verlaine wrote in Les poètes maudits at the end of the nineteenth century that he loved "this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds."
The interest in dark culture is continued in present times. American cultural critic Mark Dery's describes his preference as :"Aesthetically ... I'm interested in the unlit, unfrequented corners of society, the nethermost regions of the self: freaks, forensic pathology, true crime, conspiracy theory, cannibalism, madness, medical museums, Art Brut, weird science, sexual deviance, soft tissue modification (by tribal peoples and postmodern primitives), creature features, alien abductions, insects, Situationism, Surrealism, science fiction, the gothic, the grotesque, the carnivalesque -- in short, extremes and excess of every sort. I want to induce, in my reader, the vertigo that comes from leaning too far over the edge of the cultural abyss." [1]
Dark Romanticism
Dark romanticism is a literary subgenre that emerged from Romanticism popular in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Key writers of the darker strains of Romanticism include E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany, Lord Byron in England, Edgar Allan Poe in the United States and Charles Baudelaire in France.
Dark Romanticism is connected to the gothic novel. The 'gothic' sensibility flourished in most European literatures. Every European country had its own terminology to denote the sensibility of the gothic novel. In France it was called the roman noir ("black novel", in Germany it was called the Schauerroman ("shudder novel"). Italy and Spain must have had their own, but I am unaware of their names as of yet. In nineteenth century France there also flourished a literature of horror on a par with the English Gothic novel or the German Schauerroman. It was christened 'le roman frénétique'.
See also
- Dark
- Black comedy
- Black humour
- Dark comedy
- Dark romanticism
- Disturbing
- Horror
- Noir
- Pessimism
- Tragedy
- Underground
- Violence
Related terms
black - hidden - night - obscure - occult
