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Originally Posted by BloodyMage
1748. Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Woman published by Samuel Richardson. A young virtuous woman is drugged, raped and kept prisoner by a man attempting to trick her into marrying him. While yes, some of them aren't depressing, the likely hood is that you'll have to have to study the darker ones to get to the more pleasant ones.
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Yes but there is a difference between outlining terrible events and incorporating them into a encompassing literary theory- it's the difference between "Here is a rape" and "WE ARE ALL RAPISTS".
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Part of an English Major though is really the exploration of literature and trying to figure out why the author wrote what he wrote and what exactly he was trying to say. This is why you'll see so many different fields of literary criticism ranging from historic critics to psychoanalytical criticism. I mean, I'm not familiar with what books you're talking about but if you look at some of the authors and what was happening in their lives, such as (for lack of a better example) Jack Kerouac's On The Road. It's so closely autobiographical that you can pretty much place the whole book into his life but the names are changed. The whole book isn't that dark, certainly not as much as the books you've mentioned, but it's depressing because the character mentions that he's just lost his father, he's split from his wife and he's recovering from an illness and by the end of the book, nothing has really changed. He's traversed America but nothing really changed, he's not much of a better person because of it, and if you look into the context of the author you see that he's writing this after his father has died, and his separated from his wife and he's recovered from an illness and travelled back and forth across America, so you can see why he's written this novel. Nothing changes in the novel because the writer feels that nothing has changed. And that's how it happens sometimes. You've got a writer who feels pretty depressed and down, but he's a writer and he wants to write, so he writes, but what he's feeling comes out in his writing and you even up with depressed literature.
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This is all irrelevant if you are a new critic *titter titter*
Man I hate new criticism. It is especially great because I only encounter literary theory as it crossects with historical analysis of sources so we get new critic historians. Most self-defeating field ever.