Anti-transcendentalism and dark romanticism in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"

Abstract

This review seeks to analyse the short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, by Edgar Allan Poe, and to study its connection to the anti-transcendentalist and dark romantic movements. Through an examination of the literary aspects contained in the story, this work aims to inspect Poe's writing style, notedly marked by a bold approach of the themes of death, mourning and decay, and to compare his aesthetic decisions - such as the strong symbolic streak, the reliance on colour and architecture and the artistic depiction of death - to the chief tenets that influenced anti-transcendentalist writers over the 19th century.