Young Shelley immersed himself in Gothic fiction, especially in 1809–11. The immediate results were his Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and his earliest long verse narrative, The Wandering Jew. As derivative as these were, they show the wide range of his Gothic reading and his initial ways of striving to make the Gothic his own. Despite his regretting these ‘extravagances’, it turns out he never left the Gothic behind. Instead, he enriched the suggestiveness of Gothic symbol-making across his career – from Alastor and his contributions to Mary’s Frankenstein to The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and The Triumph of Life – partly by building on the Gothic’s expansion from the 1760s on but also by exploiting the symbolic fundamentals of ‘Gothic Story’ as Horace Walpole defined them in The Castle of Otranto. By reworking Walpole’s interplay between the assumptions of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ romance, Shelley repeatedly used the Gothic to intimate the tug-of-war between retrogressive and progressive ideologies that simmered in his own thought and in Western culture.

Chapter 5 is dedicated to a reading of the drama by Georg Büchner entitled Danton’s Death. The work concerns the trial and execution of the French revolutionary Georges Danton and his comrades. By choosing the French Revolution as his background, Büchner sets the stage for a questioning of the meaning of human existence. The reader knows from the start that most of the main characters in the piece will end up on the guillotine. It is a cruel and inhuman world, where love and friendship play little role. The threat of death is everywhere, and suicide is a frequent theme. Danton represents a voice of nihilism. He despairs of the lack of meaning of human existence and even meets his death with a kind of indifference or even relief. He claims that since we will all die sooner or later, it does not really matter when it happens. The immediate situation of the prisoners awaiting their execution can be regarded as a metaphor for human life in general. Once we are born, we are all destined for death. There is no sign of redemption, reconciliation, or a peace in an afterlife. Death and life are equally meaningless. The world is a cruel and inhuman place, where we suffer merely to survive.