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LOOKING FOR THOSE ROMANTIC NOVELS
THAT NEVER GET PUBLISHED. SWITCHBANKS
WILL
CANDICE
WILL BE UPDATING THIS SECTION
IN THE NEAR FUTURE
BY
CANDICE. S Updated
ROMANCE
(genre)
Literature
Characteristics of the romance
The term was coined to distinguish
popular material in the vernacular
(at first the Romance languages
French, Portuguese and Spanish,
later German, English and others)
from scholarly and ecclesiastical
literature in Latin.
The
boundaries between the romance
and the chansons de geste of the
troubadours were somewhat fluid.
In general, the ballads were the
property of professional performers,
while the romance was associated
more with amateurs and private
readers. Nevertheless, a professional
poet-performer like Chrétien
de Troyes could turn his hand
to composing romances. The distinction
between an early verse romance
and a chanson de geste is often
difficult, and perhaps unnecessary,
to make.
Unlike
the novel (nouvelle romaine or
"new romance") and like
the chansons de geste, the romance
dealt with traditional themes,
above all three thematic cycles
of tales, assembled in imagination
at a late date as the Matter of
Rome (actually centered on the
life and deeds of Alexander the
Great), the Matter of France (Charlemagne
and Roland, his principal paladin)
and the Matter of Britain (the
lives and deeds of King Arthur
and the Knights of the Round Table,
within which was incorporated
the quest for Holy Grail). The
Acritic songs (dealing with Digenis
Acritas and his fellow frontiersmen)
resemble much the chanson de geste,
though they developed simultaneously
but separately.
A
related tradition existed in Northern
Europe, and comes down to us in
the form of epics, such as Beowulf
and the Nibelungenlied. However,
the richest set of Germanic Romantic
literature comes from Scandinavia
in the form of the Fornaldarsagas.
The setting is Scandinavia, but
occasionally it moves temporarily
to more distant and exotic locations.
There are also very often mythological
elements, such as gods, dwarves,
elves, dragons, giants and magic
swords. The heroes often embark
on dangerous quests where they
fight the forces of evil, dragons,
witchkings, barrow-wights, and
rescue fair maidens.
Fornalder (times past), painting
by Peter Nicolai ArboMany or most
of the sagas are based on distant
historic events and this is evident
in cases where there are corroborating
sources, such as Göngu-Hrólfs
saga, Ragnars saga loðbrókar,
Yngvars saga víðförla
and Völsunga saga. In the
case of Hervarar saga the names
in the Gothic setting indicate
a historic basis, and the latter
parts of the saga are still used
as a historic source for Swedish
history. They often contain very
old Germanic matter, such as the
Hervarar saga and the Völsunga
saga which contains poetry about
Sigurd that did not find its way
into the Poetic Edda and which
would otherwise have been lost.
Other sagas deal with heroes such
as Ragnar Lodbrok, Starkad, Orvar-Odd,
Hagbard and Signy.
In
the later medieval and Renaissance
period, the important European
literary trend was to fantastic
fiction. Exemplary work, such
as the English Le Morte d'Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory (c.1408–1471),
and the Spanish/Portuguese Amadis
de Gaula (1508), spawned many
imitators, and the genre was popularly
well-received, producing such
masterpiece of renaissance poetry
as Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando
furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme
Liberata and other 16th century
literary works in the romance
genre. But in the judgement of
many learned readers of the time,
the romance was poor literature,
inspiring only broken-down ageing
and provincial persons such as
Don Quixote, knight of isolated
province La Mancha. Hudibras also
lampoons the faded conventions
of chivalrous romance. Romances
had been deemed harmful distractions
from more substantive or moral
works from the high Middle Ages,
in works of piety, but by 1600
most readers would agree.
Many
medieval romances recount the
marvellous adventures of a chivalrous,
heroic knight, often of super-human
ability, who, abiding chivalry's
strict codes of honour and demeanour,
goes on a quest, and fights and
defeats monsters and giants, thereby
winning favour with a lady. The
story of the medieval romance
focuses not upon love and sentiment,
but upon adventure; some would
call contemporary comic books
and science fiction the genre's
successors.
The
first romances heavily drew on
the legends and fairy tales to
supply their characters with marvelous
powers. The tale of Sir Launfal
features a fairy bride from folklore,
and Sir Orfeo's wife is kidnapped
by the fairy king, and Sir Orfeo
frees her from there. These marvelous
abilities subside with the development
of the genre; fairy women such
as Morgan le Fay become enchantresses,
and knights lose magical abilities.
Romancers
wrote many of their stories in
three, thematic cycles: (i) the
Arthurian (the lives and deeds
of King Arthur and the Knights
of the Round Table); (ii) the
Carlovingian (the lives and deeds
of Charlemagne, and Roland, his
principal paladin); and, (iii)
the Alexandrian (the life and
deeds of Alexander the Great).
In the later medieval and Renaissance
period, the important European
literary trend was to fantastic
fiction. Exemplary work, such
as the English Le Morte d'Arthur
(c.1469), by Sir Thomas Malory
(c.1408–1471), and the Spanish
Amadís of Gaul (1508),
spawned many imitators, and the
genre was popularly well-received.
Originally,
this literature was written in
Old English and Provençal,
later, in French and German—the
notable works being King Horn,
Havelok the Dane; and Amis and
Amiloun; later romances were written
as prose, e.g. Le Morte d'Arthur.
Don
Quixote (1605, 1615), by Miguel
de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616),
is a satirical story of an elderly
country gentleman, living in La
Mancha province, crazed by reading
chivalric romances.
Relationship to modern 'romantic
fiction'
In later romances, particularly
those of French origin, there
is a marked tendency to emphasize
themes of courtly love, such as
faithfulness in adversity. From
ca. 1800 the connotations of "romance"
moved from fantastic and eerie,
somewhat Gothic adventure narratives
of novelists like Ann Radcliffe's
The Sicilian Romance (1790) or
The Romance of the Forest (1791)
with erotic content to novels
centered on the episodic development
of a courtship that ends in marriage.
With a female protagonist, during
the rise of Romanticism the depiction
of the course of such a courtship
within contemporary conventions
of realism, the female equivalent
of the "novel of education",
informs much Romantic fiction.
The
starting point of the fornaldarsagas'
influence on the creation of the
Fantasy genre is the publication,
in 1825, of the most famous Swedish
literary work Frithjof's saga,
which was based on the Friðþjófs
saga ins frœkna, and it became
an instant success in England
and Germany. It is said to have
been translated twenty-two times
into English, twenty times into
German, and once at least into
every European language, including
modern Icelandic in 1866. Their
influence on authors, such as
J. R. R. Tolkien, William Morris
and Poul Anderson and on the subsequent
modern fantasy genre is considerable,
and can perhaps not be overstated.
Modern
usage of Romance novel denotes
a particular erotic style in a
highly conventionalized modern
genre, and its sub-genres in historical
settings, the well-named "Bodice
rippers" produced by teams
of authors often writing under
joint pseudonyms.
Despite
the popularity of this meaning
of Romance, other works are still,
occasionally, referred to as romances
because of their uses of other
elements descended from the medieval
romance, or from the Romantic
movement: larger-than-life heroes
and heroines, drama and adventure,
marvels that may become fantastic,
themes of honor and loyalty, or
fairy-tale-like stories and story
settings. Shakespeare's later
comedies, such as The Tempest
or The Winter's Tale are sometimes
called his romances. Modern works
may differentiate from love-story
as romance into different genres,
such as planetary romance or Ruritanian
romance.
Northrop Frye's definition
The critic Northrop Frye in Anatomy
of Criticism (1957) used romance
in two separate meanings.
In
one, he separated some essentials
of romance from the Medieval historical
vehicles, to distinguish Romance
as a mode that may be detected
as a theme or atmosphere in other
fictions, one that falls between
the mode of "myth" and
that of "high mimetic".
Expanding Aristotle's Poetics,
Frye classified fictions by the
power of the hero's actions, which
may be greater than ours, or less,
or roughly of the same degree.
Thus if the hero is superior in
kind to men, the action is a myth.
If the hero is superior in degree
to others and to his environment,
the mode is that of Romance, where
the actions are marvellous, but
the hero is human.
The
hero of romance moves in a world
in which the ordinary laws of
nature are slightly suspended:
prodigies of courage and endurance,
unnatural to us, are natural to
him, and enchanted weapons, talking
animals, terrifying ogres and
witches, and talismans of miraculous
power violate no rule of probability...
Romance divides into two main
forms: a secular form dealing
with chivalry and knight-errantry,
and a religious form devoted to
legends of saints. Both lean heavily
on miraculous violations of natural
law for their interest as stories"
(Frye pp 33-34).
If,
on the other hand, the hero is
superior to other men but not
to his environment, the tale falls
into the mode of high mimetic.
He
also divided fictions into the
fields of comedy, romance, tragedy,
and irony. In this division, the
essential component of romance
is adventure, and the central
theme is the hero's rescue of
a princess from a dragon
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