What is the romance?

As the term is used here, “romance” does not mean love story. The fictions taken up in this chapter may or may not include love stories. Labeling these novels “romances” has more to do with certain formal and thematic characteristics than with notions of courtship, sexual attraction, and marriage. Romance designates a wide variety of novels featuring out-of-the-ordinary adventures, mysterious or supernatural circumstances, difficult quests, and miraculous triumphs. These novels often have an epic or mythic cast and display a marked lack of concern for questions of plausibility. Together with the sentimental novel, the romance predominates in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.

The story of the novel's emergence told by Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Ian Watt, and others helps to situate the subgenre of romance. According to these theorists of the genre, the novel, as we know it, is a relatively late literary invention, coming into being roughly coincident with the Reformation and the emergence of bourgeois capitalism. A modern form for modern times, the novel, observes Benjamin, marks a substantial departure from the storyteller's legends, fairy tales, and epics (87). Benjamin describes the storyteller as an artisan and his/her oral tales as akin to handicrafts, such as pottery. These tales incorporate the shared wisdom and experience of the community and change subtly over time as the community changes. By contrast, the novel is more like a newspaper, a vehicle of bits of information rather than a living record of communal insight.