In the 1820s and 30s, both writers and literary critics were to comment upon the fashion for the genre of horror, which is linked to romanticism and which is given a variety of names. If the gothic novel stays a productive source of inspiration, romantic horror can nevertheless not be reduced to the resurrection of this model. Leaving aside the gothic environment and the terrors it produces, these romantic novels glorify the victory of evil over innocence and cultivate an “aesthetics of shock” (Milner). Nonetheless the poetics of horror is all the less susceptible to being accounted for by a single definition as it is easily combined with other novelistic genres. Frenetic romanticism, which literary criticism condemned in unison, which no writer vouched for, is both invisible and omnipresent within the field of the novel.