Literature
Historical Romance Fiction
Historical romance fiction is a genre of literature that typically takes place in a historical setting and focuses on a romantic relationship as a central theme. These novels often feature strong, independent heroines and dashing heroes, and they provide readers with a blend of historical details and passionate love stories. The genre is known for its ability to transport readers to different time periods while exploring the complexities of human emotions.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
12 Key excerpts on "Historical Romance Fiction"
eBook - PDF- Victorine Lieske, Leslie Wainger(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- For Dummies(Publisher)
First, you have to decide whether to write a historical or a contemporary romance. To make this decision, you need to know what each consists of. The basic distinction is obvious, and I feel a little silly pointing it out: Historical romances are set in the past, and contemporary romances are set in the present. But the differences don’t end there. CHAPTER 2 Romancing the Marketplace: Identifying Your Options 23 Contemporary romances account for the bulk of sales, in large part because most series romance lines are contemporary, but historical romances (including the Regency subgenre) are also extremely popular. Paging through history Technically, any book set between the Stone Age and today is a historical book because it’s set in the past. But readers and publishers define a historical romance more narrowly than that. There are exceptions, but the earliest era that shows up regularly in historical romances is the medieval period (knights and chivalry are quite popular). At the other end, publishers used to set the late 1800s as the cutoff point for historical romances, but you could still find books set as late as the San Francisco earth- quake of 1906 or the days of Pancho Villa (who was active from around 1910 to 1920). Now that we’re in the 21st century, the cutoff date may continue to shift, with individual editors deciding, based on individual books, what they feel com- fortable with. That definition leaves a big chunk of the recent past in limbo, including both World Wars, the ’50s, and the ’60s. These time periods are too recent to be con- sidered historical but too far in the past to be considered contemporary. (Check out the “Mainstream versus category” section later in this chapter for more about this limbo period.) Also, most historical romances are set in one of two places: the United States, especially the West (due to the cowboy mystique, though Native Americans are quite popular, too), or Europe, especially England.
- K. Cooper, E. Short, K. Cooper, E. Short(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
We base our understanding of history as events prior to 1970, the breadth 2 The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction of the collection reflecting, as we shall presently discuss, the wide range of historical periods which engage the imaginations of contemporary novelists and their readers. The historical female figure Historical fiction has been a popular genre throughout the history of the novel, one which has often been associated with a female reader- ship, and with traditionally feminine concerns such as love, romance and domestic intrigue. These assumed links between women, love and romance mean that the genre has rarely been perceived as historically accurate, with its setting in the past considered to be little more than a plot device adding intrigue and novelty. As Diana Wallace writes, the tendency for critics ‘has been to associate women’s historical novels with romance and thus to stigmatize it as escapist’. 1 The reinvention of historical fiction by Sir Walter Scott in the eighteenth century served to further compound this link between the women’s historical novel and romance and/or historical inaccuracy by setting up a clear and heavily gendered distinction within the genre. Scott’s novels – the adventure stories of Rob Roy (1817) and Ivanhoe (1819) – were aimed largely at a male audience, and emphasis was placed on their basis in historical fact. The previous forays of women into the genre – such as that of the author Maria Edgeworth, whose historical novel Castle Rackrent was published in 1800, some fourteen years before Scott’s first foray into the genre with Waverley (1814) – were widely dismissed, as Wallace describes, as romantic escapism.
eBook - ePubWithout the Novel
Romance and the History of Prose Fiction
- Scott Black(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- University of Virginia Press(Publisher)
Introduction Romance and the Turbulence of Literary History Reading is not always a modern activity. Readers may get carried away by their books, lose themselves, or discover themselves enchanted. An activity of temporal displacement as much as historical placement, reading may short-circuit the progress assumed by modernity, producing eddies in time or introducing pockets of the past into the present. At such moments, books too are carried along and realized anew, resurfacing in strange worlds, out of place, reanimated in other minds. The genre of romance is formed at such seams of time, when ancient forms seem to live on like zombies refusing to die and stalking us through our daylight worlds with fantastic anxieties and embarrassing pleasures. 1 Romance is also formed of the seams of time, of temporal knots, loops, or vortices that register and provoke an experience of transhistorical reading—across different times, irresolvable into one. At the genre’s several sites of origin, foundational romances present themselves as secondary, belated, and critical adaptations of strange, archaic, or foreign narratives. In updating such alien stories, these originary romances also self-consciously relay them, offering a space in the contemporary world in which to stage, explore, and enjoy the continuing force of old forms
eBook - ePubWomen's Romantic Theatre and Drama
History, Agency, and Performativity
- Keir Elam, Lilla Maria Crisafulli(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
If we go back to Scott’s approach to historical narrative we notice that his ‘medieval’ novels differ entirely from the previous ones, which were set in recent Scottish history. While history was rapidly turning into a science based upon original and indisputable documents, literature took upon itself to provide a popular version of official history and to explore aspects that mainstream history was not allowed to touch upon. Literary works therefore offered a private version of history, which was paradoxically anachronistic because the past was reconstructed by juxtaposing episodes belonging to different ages; even historical characters could be turned into hybrid, fictional figures, and submitted to revision and reinterpretation. 4 Another important aspect of Romantic historicism is that it took into consideration not only public figures but also common people, and the way they were affected by and reacted to history. Romantic historicism was therefore largely pragmatic, and focused on the true maker of history, the social body, and on its everlasting conflict with great historical figures. 5 Obviously, to re-write history appeared easier when literature drew upon a far-away past rather than the recent one. These new concepts of history and historical narrative rapidly spread among the members of the middle class, to which most readers of historical fiction and most theatre-goers belonged. This explains how women managed to take part in the creation of innovative concepts of historical fiction and drama, and of new narrative and theatrical techniques. A politically oriented interpretation of historical literature, which considered its realistic elements more important than its fictional ones, was sure to ignore women’s contribution to historical literature
- Christine Berberich(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
The historical details must be accurate even as the past world is one sanitized by imagination; the emotions, hopes and fears are real. There must be enough ‘fact’ to create the sense of ‘reality’ of the period, and there will also be elements of the current writer’s concerns, issues and place. Historical Romance Fiction mingles ‘reality’ and distance. Regency England is so popular as a historical era that it is given its own subgenre. Technically only 1810–20 but often stretched to 1830, the Regency was a period of social and economic upheaval; with a rising new middle class, its threat to the aristocracy and continued war with France, the era provides a setting with plenty of conflict. The formal code of etiquette was to distance the upper classes – aristocracy and gentry – from any vulgarity of the lower classes and enforced a hierarchal structure of social, political or economic The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction 60 ranking. Georgette Heyer (1902–74), writing from the 1920s to the 1960s, is often credited as founder of the Regency with Regency Buck (1935), an Austen-esque romance but equally reflective of contemporary mores. Heyer remains, perhaps, the most influential Regency romance writer. The Gothic tradition includes a threatening world imbued with mystery and unexplained phenomena. Heroines are the target of some danger or peril, both physical and psychological, the threat of violence coming from complete strangers or domestic partners. The style was popular in the nineteenth century and became re-vitalized with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) into a new wave of modern Gothic. The Gothic tradition aided the development of romantic suspense and the paranormal. Romantic suspense incorporates a blend of love and danger. The action/adventure plotline parallels the development of the love relationship.
eBook - PDF- M. Makinen(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
It is the reader’s vicarious participation in this heightened state of desire, this ‘falling in love’, the experience of being courted, that marks out the romance 23 M. Makinen, Feminist Popular Fiction © Merja Makinen 2001 genre format. The clearest examples are those of the formulaic series romances from publishers such as Mills and Boon, Harlequin and Silhouette, where the detailed presentation of the experiential minu- tiae of the attraction and the set-backs necessitates two-dimensional representations of less important elements such as background, minor characters, and even plot. The same focus on emotional vicissitudes is present in the whole range of the genre, historical romances, gothic romances, and mystery romances, although these obviously display more contextual detail and more convoluted plotting. Romance can voice a repressed feminine desire in the only genre dominated by women, both as writers and readers, and it can reach a phenomenally huge popular audience. Romance readers consume more texts than most of the other genres put together. That not all women hold feminist views is axiomatic, and a large number of romance texts promulgate phallocentric attitudes towards feminine desire, but the range of the representations allows for more contesta- tion within the genre, than some critics concede. A history of the genre Anderson credits circulating libraries such as Mudie’s Select Library (1842–1880s) as developing the wider-circulation popular fiction. By the turn of the century, most publishing houses had a cheaper series devoted to adventure and romance fiction, retailing at around two shillings, though some were as cheap as seven old pence. 4 The popular romance in the late nineteenth century translated desire into a more acceptable sacred fervour, with the innocent upper-class women saved from enforced marriages or threatened dishonour because of their spir- itual goodness. The works of Charlotte M. Yonge set a trend at the turn of the century.
eBook - ePub- Jerome De Groot, Jerome de Groot(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
chapter 2 ). And finally, the innate alienness of historical fiction serves to suggest that having any prior awareness is of little consequence.LITERARY FICTION AND HISTORY
For the moment, though, let us focus our discussion on British and what has been termed Anglophone writing. In 1984 when the influential literary journal Granta published their first ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ list historical fiction writing was generally absent, as it similarly was in 1994 when the second list appeared, but in 2004 many of the young writers featured took history as their subject. Similarly, since the nomination of Rose Tremain's Restoration and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (the eventual winner) in 1989, the Booker prize has frequently recognised Anglophone historical fiction. Booker judge Natasha Walter noted the upsurge of interest in historical settings, particularly in novels by women, in a 1999 essay that lamented how these new fictions were over-researched and inert: ‘can all this pretty detail substitute for the vigour of real imaginative engagement with a novelist's own times?’ (Walter 1999).Writing historical novels is no longer something to be considered vulgar, the preserve of romance writers, or guaranteed to tie one to a particular type of genre. ‘That recent British and anglophone fiction has taken a historical turn has become an axiom of critical commentary,’ writes Suzanne Keen (Keen 2006: 167), and she argues that, of all the sub-genres of the novel, the historical is the only one that has been widely, successfully and respectfully used by contemporary literary writers. Keen quotes Linda Duguid's judgement that historical fiction has ‘become respectable, even intellectual’ (cited in Keen 2006: 168). Of course, it might be argued that the literary turn to the historical form of the 1990s was merely a return; aschapter 2
eBook - PDFA Companion to Romance
From Classical to Contemporary
- Corinne Saunders(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Medieval romance may be seen as formative in that it establishes both the great matters of romance, especially that of Arthur, and its great motifs – quest, adventure, otherworld journey, love. Thence each age adds to and rewrites romance, making the genre its own and yet retaining those crucial structures. In the writing of Sidney and Spenser, epic romance finds its flowering; in Shakespeare’s last plays, romance attains a dramatic height never again reached; in the eighteenth century, romance gains a parodic force and at the same time enters the genre of the novel, most notably as the Gothic; in the Romantic period, it is rewritten once again, shaping and shaped by an intellectual and artistic movement of peculiar force; in the fiction and poetry of the Victorian period, the images and structures of romance are refracted through a distinctive moral lens; and in the twentieth century, romance inspires a series of sub-genres – imperial romance, contemporary fantasy, science fiction, popular romance, as well as influencing and shaping modern and postmodern poetry and fiction. It is easy to find constants in the recurrent motifs, most of all perhaps the power of the marvelous, which underpins the genres of fantasy and science fiction, but it is also imperative to recognize that romance finds its individual power through engagement with precise historical moments. This duality of historicity and timelessness seems to fuel romance, making it an enduring mode of infinite potential that can both reach beyond the everyday and remain firmly rooted in it. Underlying the development of romance is this crucial issue of its relation to realism, and perhaps most of all romances of different periods are linked by their inclusion of nonrealist elements, often combined with a detailed mimetic quality. Thus the otherworlds of romance tend to be presented in carefully mimetic terms – political, social, and moral – and set against societies on the one hand distant, on the
eBook - PDF- Harold J. Morowitz(Author)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
i n t r o d u c t i o n History, Fiction, and the Complementarity of Narrative Representations The analysis of the relationship between history and fiction—a problem that has stimulated European thought since the time of Aristotle, was developed by Vico, and then elaborated in structural and post-structural theory—has special relevance in the Russian context in general and for the study of Pushkin in particular. The beginning of the nineteenth century was a turning point in the development of both Russian literary and historical imagination. This was the time of artistic experimen-tation, when old genres were rethought and new ones prolifer-ated. The Romanticist interest in history generated an intense growth in historical fiction and history proper. This further stimulated generic awareness among Russian writers. It has often been observed that the conflation of history and imaginative literature was particularly typical of Russian liter-ary and historical traditions. Russia, with its peculiar develop-ment and separation from the rest of Europe, had no formal historiography, nor did it have fully developed traditions of formal theology and philosophy until the beginning of the nine-teenth century. Literature came to fulfill those functions that were divided in the West among various disciplines and areas of human knowledge such as philosophy, theology, history, ethics, aesthetics, law, and political science. The particular character-istics of European Romantic historiography—a desire to sup-plement the traditional skills of the neoclassical historian, such as erudition and critical judgment, with creative mythmaking and poetic insight—were deeply rooted in Russian cultural tra-dition. The European Romantics at the beginning of the nine-teenth century advanced the figure of the poet-historian, one 2 Introduction that Nietzsche later conjured up in reaction to positivist science and conventional historical thought.
eBook - PDFThe Contemporary British Historical Novel
Representation, Nation, Empire
- M. Boccardi(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The suspicion of the genre’s complicity with the assumptions, means and aims of the heritage industry is fostered by the prevalent setting for contemporary historical novels, the Victorian period, conveniently near enough the present in time to be emotion- ally appealing, yet different enough not to impinge on the readers’ preconceived attitudes towards it. The mid-nineteenth century has been made familiar by the numerous costume dramas and adapta- tions of classic novels for the screen, both of which pride themselves in the accuracy of their reconstruction of the period in all its details (objects, clothes, manners, speech) and therefore emphasise its static value as a completed, teeming, exhaustively investigated whole. The plots of contemporary historical novels are primarily concerned with individual lives and loves, and only incidentally with the historical events impinging on them. This is perhaps inevitable, in so far as a focus on the individual in his or her interaction with his or her social, geographical and historical surroundings is almost by defin- ition what the novel as a genre is concerned with. However, in seek- ing to engage the reader in an emotional response to characters and events, the historical novel appeals to its consumers in similar ways to heritage reconstructions. Nor can the charge of escapism fre- quently levelled at the genre, which offers a convenient way out from Introduction 23 having to confront the difficulties of the present or even attempting to actively intervene in it, be fully dismissed, particularly when the historical setting is combined with the traditional recreational genres of detective, romance and adventure. And yet, despite their partici- pation in the perpetuation of heritage attitudes, the historical novels I consider in the chapters that follow do not conform to the a-historical premises of the commodification of the past Hewison describes.
eBook - PDF- Lee Galda, , Lauren Liang, Bernice Cullinan, Lee Galda, Lauren Liang, Bernice Cullinan(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 9-4 Historical Fiction in Varied Formats 293 American family’s keepsakes. The best of these books, with their engaging format, offer readers a glimpse of life as it was lived by a historical, albeit fictional, child, often female, someone whose voice is rarely heard in other histories. Adventure stories are very popular with many readers, such as Iain Lawrence’s The Convicts, The Cannibals , and The Castaways (all I ); Sally Gardner’s The Red Necklace: A Story of the French Revolution ( A ); and Julia Golding’s The Diamond of Drury Lane: A Cat Royal Adventure (I–A). Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (I–A), set dur-ing the heyday of Mississippi riverboats, and Stop the Train! (I–A), set in a railroad town on the west-ern prairie during the westward expansion, are both historical fiction and adventure stories. The characters’ adventures make riveting reading, and the settings add a dash of history lesson—a great combination for those readers who love adventure stories. Historical fiction can also be a mystery, as in Tess Hilmo’s With a Name Like Love (I–A), set in 1957 Arkansas, or Eleanor Updale’s Johnny Swan-son (I) , set in post–World War I England. The issues that eleven-year-old Johnny wrestles with— bullying and being bullied; being scammed and being a con artist; lying and its consequences—are articulated within the historical time and place, yet speak directly to today’s readers. Deborah Hopkinson’s The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel ( I ) is a wonderful combination of fact and fiction that is a very timely medical mystery.
eBook - PDFFeminism and Women's Writing
An Introduction
- Catherine Riley, Lynne Pearce(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
The publication of texts that took on narratological and other conventions of the form and destabilised them was a notable aspect of this effort to reclaim the romance – and, indeed, all genre fiction – from its classification as ‘low- brow’ or at best ‘middle-brow’ literature. As Anne Cranny-Francis observed in her ground-breaking survey of feminist genre fiction in 1990: Generic fiction, characterised as feminine by a masculinist (political, psycho- logical, artistic) establishment, is now being transformed by feminist ideology. Rather than rejecting the mass culture to which they were relegated (and which, as female, was relegated to them), feminist writers have embraced it, seeing its characteristic popularity as a powerful tool for their own propagandist purposes. (Cranny-Francis 1990: 5) Women writers thus self-consciously appropriated the formal properties and styles of romantic genre fiction in order to recast the traditional love story as one with literary value as well as feminist potential. Alongside critical (re) formulations, women writers began to use the conventions of the romance genre to portray strong, independent images of women and new conceptions of romantic unions. This is evidenced in the fiction of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Michèle Roberts, Alice Walker, Janet Frame, Jeanette Winterson and many other important female writers of the 1980s and 1990s. There was also a growing recognition that, no matter how problematic, ‘falling in love’ was a life event that few of us would escape. As feminist publisher Ursula Owen argued: ‘if love, friendship, birth, death, work, travel, affection comprise a limited world, it is a ghetto many of us would choose to live in’ (Owen in Owen 1988: 92). Consequently, concerted efforts were made by both authors and critics to revision the ‘boy (or girl) meets girl (or boy)’ story as feminist ideology inter- sected with the oldest story ever told: the love story.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
