See also: Romantic literature in English Dark romanticism (often conflated with Gothicism) is a literary subgenre of Romanticism. From its very inception in the late eighteenth century, Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity had been dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime, the grotesque, and the irrational. The name “Dark Romanticism” was given to this form by the literary theorist Mario Praz in his lengthy study of the genre published in 1930, ‘’The Romantic Agony’’.