AmLit – lecture notes

ROMANCE AS A GENRE

In the 17th century the rise of empirical thought, rationalism, a theology

based on analogy to the natural world and the advent of the bourgeois mode
of realism made Romance disappear as a force in literature.

However, in late 18th c., as the Sacred threatened to disappear from culture
under pressure of naturalistic explanation, of industrialization and
urbanization, romance arose again, first in the guise of Gothic romance,
which specialized in the symbolic exploration of the unconscious through
the strange, the haunting, and the irrational. The American Gothic was
adapted to local conditions; far example, the cave came to replace the
European dungeon, the haunted forest was used instead of the haunted
castle, nature becoming the incarnation of evil.

But curiously enough, the fascination for the bizarre, for the individual
peculiarity, seems to have led at the same time to a fictional discovery of the
true depths of human nature because it freed the minds of readers from direct
involvement of their superego and allowed them to pursue daydreams and
wish fulfillment in regions where inhibitions and guilt could be suspended.

Hawthorne defined the romance in opposition to the novel as a place of more

mystery, less specific description of concrete reality, a place where both
elemental and spiritual forces could be put in play in a landscape that was
full of symbolic, allegorical potential.
AmLit – lecture notes

 Romance - has "a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and

material," and although it must never “swerve aside from the truth of
the human heart," it has "fairly a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
creation.”
 Novel - based on “minute fidelity, not merely to the possible,
but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience.”

The root meaning of romance in America remaining fiction as opposed to

fact, the same duality holds true in the theory of romance when deviant
imagination is opposed to normative actuality. The romancer can therefore
ignore material reality, idealize facts in an effort to delineate universal
human experience.

So, the romance displays a degree of freedom from the ordinary novelistic
requirements of verisimilitude, development, and continuity. Hawthorne’
static romances make use of the allegorical and moral, rather than the
dramatic. The characters, rather two-dimensional types, are shown in an
ideal relation--that is, they share emotions only after these have become
abstract or symbolic. They do become profoundly involved in some way, but
it will be a deep and narrow, an obsessive type of involvement. Where the
novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the
romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery. Character itself
becomes somewhat abstract and ideal.