In his influential rereading of Northrup Frye and Erich Auerbach's accounts of the structure of identification that defines romance, Fredric Jameson argues that the genre is structured as much by difference as it is by recognition and identification. For Jameson:

As Jameson stresses, romance is predicated upon a commitment to the twin beliefs that the identity of the enemy is visibly “marked by some absolute difference” and yet that your identity is nonetheless ultimately indistinguishable from theirs. The seeming fixity and absoluteness of identity that characterizes romance also paradoxically demands a correlative fluidity of identity that stands against and alongside that fixity. Within romance, you need to be able to recognize the other less because of his utter difference than because his identity is some version of yours. In the material form of this demand for visible difference, the “black knight” is the enemy only so long as he wears his armor; when he puts that off and reveals his name, the knight who was the enemy becomes a version of the knight himself and must do so for both the social and moral structure of romance to work.