Romance has a very long and complex history.
Romance disappeared as a force in literature in the 17th century with the rise of empirical thought, rationalism, a theology based on analogy to the natural world and the advent of the bourgeois mode of realism, although it retained a slim foothold through pastoral. Gothic romance, which specialized in symbolic exploration of the unconscious through the strange, the haunting, and irrational. Like many romances the Gothic tended to be set in distant lands or on barren, threatening countrysides. He is inexplicable but compelling because he sums the fears of his time and, to an extent, ours. Frankenstein's monster showed us the terrors that scientific interference in the holiness of the human held for us.