it.

The last part of the eighteenth century showed a revolt against the
classicists. Victory came to the new romantic school, which included
authors like Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), Shelley
(1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821). The terms "romantic" and "imaginative"
were at first in great measure synonymous. The romanticists maintained that
a reality of the imagination might be as satisfying and as important as a
reality of the prosaic reason, since the human mind had the power of
imagining as well as of thinking.

The term "Gothic" was first applied to fiction by Horace Walpole
(1717-1797), who gave to his famous romance the title of "_The Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic Romance_" (1764). "Gothic" is here used in the same sense
as "romantic." Gothic architecture seemed highly imaginative and
overwrought in comparison with the severe classic order. In attempting to
avoid the old classic monotony, the Gothic school of fiction was soon noted
for its lavish use of the unusual, the mysterious, and the terrible.
Improbability, or the necessity for calling in the supernatural to untie
some knot, did not seriously disturb this school. The standard definition
of "Gothic" in fiction soon came to include an element of strangeness added
to terror. When the taste for the extreme Gothic declined, there ensued a
period of modified romanticism, which demanded the unusual and occasionally
the impossible. This influence persisted in the fiction of the greatest
writers, until the coming of the realistic school (p. 367). We are now
better prepared to understand the work of Charles Brockden Brown, the first
great American writer of romance, and to pass from him to Cooper,
Hawthorne, and Poe.