Based upon our first class discussion, I've listed below our working definition for essential traits of a romance. This is an organic list, so please add branches, roots, and leaves as you see fit.
*An interpolated or digressive / woven narrative structure. Also known entrelacement.
* Adherence to a code of conduct and a focus on external progression and movement
*A quest
*Insufficient death of major characters
* the presence of deus ex machina
*excess, both in form and content
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Not sure how to phrase this, but it seems to me that there is a specific type of language used in romance writing (elevated, poetic, imagistic, ...). I'm referring to word choice, not literary devices such as allegory. Are there examples of Renaissance-era romances that employ vulgarity, crudity, uneducated/common speech? (I don't know the answer, but I suspect not).
ReplyDeleteSuggestion only: Early modern Romances are episodic -- perhaps because they are 'assembled' out of shorter, discrete tales taken from the oral tradition (?).
ReplyDeleteAlso, it seems that, in contrast with the real world of the day, women tend to have relatively few children in Romance -- and all of them are special and important to the plot (perhaps the other dozen or so are glossed over silently as being irrelevant). Only sons and only daughters seem particularly common.
Providence/Destiny VS. Fortune/Fate (I think this is a slightly different topic from 'deus ex machina').
ReplyDeleteSomething positive looks-out-for, preserves, protects or guides the heroes/heroines in most Romances. It's more than Fortune (which, as we know, is cyclical and fickle in doling out its 'gifts') and something different from Fate (which, as often as not, can be evil).
Serendipity also seems to favour these characters.
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ReplyDeleteEpic. It was epic. It is an epic.
ReplyDeleteCan a Romance be an epic, or are they separate forms?
Most definitions use the word 'long' in conjunction with 'poem' or 'metrical' in speaking of epics. This would suggest that Arcadia is NOT an epic, whereas The Faery Queen could be. The latter has the necessary conditions of long and poetic, but are they sufficient?
Assumption: Arcadia, Faery Queen, Winter's Tale and Don Quixote -- are all Romances.
Two of the four are poetic; three of the four are long. How many are epics?
Consider two long poems that we, for argument's sake, agree are 'epic romances' - Spencer's Faery Queen and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.
It we translate Spencer's English into modern Italian (for students at the U. of Bologna) and we translate Ariosto's Italian in English (for SFU students) -- but we do so in prose so that students may better comprehend the sense of the original -- are the results of those translations still epics, or has something been lost in translation? In both cases we would have a long prose tale (à la Sidney's Arcadia), but technically, no epics.
Radical thought for today: Perhaps, verse, meter and length do not (alone) an epic make. If so, we can add to our definition of 'Romance' that it may be epic, whether or not it is in verse.
Addendum proposition to the above entry (that of Feb. 6th):
ReplyDeleteIf a Romance is not written in verse, then, by convention, some poetry and/or song is embedded within the prose text.
"A Romance is a text that ..." contains elements of the fantastic.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the relationship between what, in the past, was designated a Romance and what, today, we would call a Fantasy?
Modern writers of Fantasy often employ many of the conventions of Romance (a 'long-ago' time; mythical setting; chivalric/courtly romance; 'knightly' behaviour; often, magic; fairly clear good-vs-evil plot-lines; quests, etc.).
The modern fantasy novel was, for a long time, poo-pooed by 'serious' writers and those in academia (although, today, this is rapidly changing), but perhaps it has a noble lineage.
Proposition: the same notion of Romance understood by Sidney and Spencer survives today in the works of Robert Jordan, David Eddings, George Martin (and the big 'T' of course).
There is a link -- perhaps a somewhat discontinuous one -- between the Romance writing of the Renaissance and Middle Ages and the modern Fantasy which emerged in the late nineteenth century and blossomed in the twentieth.
The OED (as ever) is helpful:
"fantasy, phantasy, n."
4. a. Imagination; the process or the faculty of forming mental representations of things not actually present.... Now usually with sense influenced by association with fantastic or phantasm: Extravagant or visionary fancy.... an exercise of poetic imagination being conventionally regarded as accompanied by belief in the reality of what is imagined.
b. A mental image.
c. A product of imagination, fiction, figment.
d. An ingenious, tasteful, or fantastic invention or design.
Admittedly only a certain sub-set of modern Fantasy would mesh comfortably with our evolving notion of early modern Romance.
I'd propose the term "Romantic Fantasy" to include Sidney, Spencer and the moderns under one umbrella. Any takers?
What is not a Romance?
ReplyDeleteI think -- but am willing to be persuaded otherwise -- that the Scandinavian sagas of the late Middle Ages are NOT Romances. These tales, most notably the Icelandic Sagas, contain many of the pre-requisites of Romance (hero, love-interest, 'chivalric' fighting, lots of death, poetry (often), etc.), but somehow they 'feel' different. They are more like histories, perhaps because they involve real places and (we believe) real people. The language, too, is very spare -- a bit like Homer (whose works, I guess, are not Romances either).
So, we lack poetic language, mythical settings and imaginary characters. These then must be necessary conditions for something to be called a Romance, n'est ce pas?
'A Romance is a text that ...' contains omens, predictions, prophetic dreams....
ReplyDeleteForeshadowing, I suppose, is the word I'm looking for. Elements of the story are often anticipated, or revealed to the reader (and characters) well before they come to pass. I think this functions as a sort of reassurance that things will work out in the end, that there is some benevolent guiding force at work.
Dreams containing revelations seem particularly important. Heroes and heroines (and even villains) often need help, in Romances, to complete their quest, journey, mission, adventure, life -- dreams, oracles and prophecies provide hints on where to go and how to act.
This is probably related to the Providence/Destiny VS. Fortune/Fate question raised earlier (see Feb. 3rd post).
The definition of Romance needs to include some references to 'archetypes' I think.
ReplyDeleteRomance draws from that ancient well of stories that are the sources for all archetypes - myths, legends, allegory, etc.
Freud, Jung, Bettelheim, Propp and others have all pointed to the archetypal story-line, character-type, setting, etc. Romance seems to be replete with archetypes (the forest, the cave, the mountain, the tower; the shepherd, the knight-equivalent, the princess-equivalent, the worldly-wise side-kick; the quest/journey, knowledge-through-travel; death-and-rebirth; the monster, the magician, the unlooked-for saviour).
Romance is enriched and multi-layered because of its association with archetypes. Entering a Romance is like travelling through a labyrinth of allusion - some paths lead us forward, some are dead-ends, but all echo with the footsteps of previous archetypal tales.
In response to January 7 post, would you be willing to consider Johnson's seven champions as a "romance" that traffics in the vulgar tongue? Or at least in a burlesque of elevated diction?
ReplyDeleteAs for Fantasy and Romance--look at the activities of "Phantastes" in the first chamber of Alma's brain turret in Book 2, canto 9. The kinds of things that he produces look, I think, both like what we might call "early modern romance" and "fantasy."
ReplyDeleteI think, however, that Emily's point is well taken that we need to suss out how much of a change happens with the genre once the religious context becomes less cruical and enlightment ideas encroach into the realm of archetypes.