American Renaissance & American Romanticism
American Renaissance & American Romanticism
"Romance" as narrative genre
In everyday speech "romance" suggests love.
The term's meaning in literature is consistent with this popular usage but applies broadly to an important narrative concept in literature.
from A Handbook to Literature, by C. Hugh Holman (3d ed.), Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.
Romance: This word was
first used for Old French as a language derived
from Latin or "Roman" to distinguish it from Latin itself (this
meaning has now been extended so that any of the languages derived from Latin,
such as Spanish or Italian, is called a Romance language).
Later romance was applied to
any work written in French, and as stories of knights and their deeds were the
dominant form of Old French Literature, the word romance
was narrowed to mean such stories. . . . Special
modern uses of the word romance may be noted from the account in the New
English Dictionary: "romantic fiction"; "an extravagant
fiction"; a "fictitious narrative in prose of which the scene and
incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life . . . .
Romance is now frequently used as a term to designate a kind of
fiction that differs from the novel in being more freely the product of the
author's imagination than the product of an effort to represent the actual world
with verisimilitude. In American
literature, in particular, it has become fashionable to speak of the
"tradition of the American novel" as being that of the romance
. . . .
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from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.
In the form in which we possess it, most of
[European fiction] has already moved into the category of romance.
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. (34)
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from A Handbook to Literature, by C. Hugh
Holman (3d ed.), Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.
Medieval Romance: Medieval romances are tales of adventure in which knights, kings, or distressed ladies, acting under the impulse of love, religious faith, or the mere desire for adventure, are the chief figures. The medieval romance appears in Old French literature of the twelfth century as a form which supplants the older chanson de geste, an epic form. The epic reflects an heroic age whereas the romance reflects a chivalric age; the epic has weight and solidity, whereas the romance exhibits mystery and fantasy; the epic does not stress rank or social distinctions, important in the romance . . . . Structurally, the medieval romance follows the loose pattern of the quest. . . .