Literature
Regency Romance
Regency romance is a subgenre of historical romance fiction set during the British Regency era (1811-1820) and often features themes of love, social class, and manners. These novels typically focus on the romantic relationships and societal norms of the time, often incorporating elements of wit, elegance, and the complexities of courtship within the Regency period.
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8 Key excerpts on "Regency Romance"
eBook - ePub- Pamela Regis(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
The possibilities are broad and varied. They flavor the kind of action that the book will depict, the subplots, the kind of behavior that is acceptable between the hero and heroine, which is a function of the kind of society that the setting provides. Consideration of society is not gone in these books, but it is less important in the popular romance of the twentieth century than it was in the canonical romances examined in Part III. 13 C IVIL C ONTRACTS Georgette Heyer Beginning in 1921, Georgette Heyer (1902–1974) wrote one and sometimes two historical romance novels per year until her death in 1974. A 19§4 survey taken in Great Britain of the public libraries reported that between four and six copies of her novels were borrowed on any given day (Glass 283). Copies in public libraries in America have been borrowed and read until their covers tall off. Perhaps the strongest evidence of her continued popularity is that much of her backlist is still in print. This body of work is her legacy to the history of the romance. Her influence is felt in every historical romance novel written since 1921, particularly in the Regency Romance novel. Heyer is the mother of this kind of romance. The Regency is that period in English history between I SI I and 1820 when the Prince of Wales ruled England as regent for his father, the incapacitated George III. A regent rules during a king or queen’s inability to fulfill his or her duties. The Regency period ended in I 820 because the old king died and the prince became King George IV Regencies are among the most popular historical romance novels and are set in this time period. Each novel includes the core elements explained in Part II : the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines and heroes (in Heyer’s case, usually one) as well as a meeting, barrier, the attraction between heroine and hero, a declaration, point of ritual death, and recognition
eBook - PDF- Victorine Lieske, Leslie Wainger(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- For Dummies(Publisher)
Indie authors have also seen the benefit of creating anthologies. Coming together to produce one book with similar stories can introduce new readers to your work, help advertise your other work, and create something fun for readers. This, too, is by invita- tion only, but as an indie author you have the opportunity to be the one inviting other authors to join you. Don’t be afraid to approach other indie authors who are selling well to see if they would be interested in a collaboration. This is where spending time in author groups can pay off. They are much more likely to say yes if they know you from an author group than if they have no idea who you are and what you write. 32 PART 1 Welcome to the World of Romance Writing In romances, English novelist Georgette Heyer (1902–74) popularized the period, and her name is still synonymous with the Regency Romance. Her books, more than any histories, continue to inform the subgenre. Two things distinguish a traditional Regency Romance: » Length: Most historical romances are at least 100,000 words long (Harlequin Historicals, with a minimum length of 90,000 words, are an exception), but the traditional Regency is shorter, around 65,000 words. » Tone: The traditional Regency is also generally lighter in tone, often almost a comedy of manners, and both the author and the characters pay a great deal of attention to the ins and outs of society and the social whirl. Though Regencies were once very low-key in terms of sensuality, a lot more variety exists these days, and some can be quite sensuous. In more recent years, Regencies have expanded, so publishers have put out full- length (in historical-romance terms) Regencies, many of them darker stories that explore the underside of the society of the time and allow their characters to face heavier issues. Indie publishing has also changed the landscape, with many authors, such as Sally Britton, publishing shorter Regencies with more frequency.
- Martin Hipsky(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Ohio University Press(Publisher)
For my understanding of the discursive strands woven into the term in its British usage during the period, I rely in part on Gillian Beer’s diachronic account of the mode. Beer acknowledges that the romance is too broad to be considered a single genre, yet she traces lines of continuity that stretch from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas Malory to the later twentieth century. She catalogues what she calls a “cluster of properties” that distinguish the romance from other literary kinds, the most significant of which are the following: content based in love and adventure; the hero’s and/or heroine’s partial withdrawal from society; broadly limned characters; the interfusing of the quotidian and the marvellous; a sustained series of actions or incidents; “a strongly enforced code of conduct to which all the characters must comply”; and a happy ending. 6 What I have found most pertinent here is twofold. First, keeping in view the sheer length of time during which the romance form has been central to English-language traditions—well over six hundred years—helps us to avoid a reductive view of the romance as realism’s determinate negation (a reductivism that, to be fair, is partly attributable to the late Victorians’ own framings of “the realism versus romance debates”). There was the era of the Arthurian cycles, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the rush of new romance-writing energies in the Elizabethan period, when writers such as John Lyly and Philip Sidney were inspired by translations of ancient Greek romances; the gradual schematization of the romance narrative contra “the novel” (or what came retroactively to be labeled realist fiction) in the eighteenth century; the new offshoots of gothic romance and the English Romantic movement soon thereafter; and, in the nineteenth century, the energetic development of romance genres as a challenge to the deterministic realism coming over from France (G. Beer, Romance, 6)
- Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo, Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
5 However, some of this first-wave criticism did examine the historical romance as a specific subgenre with its own appeals.In her book Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women’s Romance Fiction (1984), Kay Mussell devotes specific sections of her chapters on romance formulas and settings to historical romance. According to her, “The imaginative historical setting often locates impediments to love in the power relationships of a patriarchal society that devalues women’s emotions and desires” (69). Mussell argues that these romances reimagine history to place female domestic concerns at the center of the story and characterize successful love as a rebellion against societal constraints, while the whole story takes place at a convenient “psychic distance” from the reader (64). That same year, Radway observes in Reading the Romance that historical romance is one of the most popular subgenres among the readers in her study. While she doesn’t discuss historical novels extensively, Radway makes two important points about the historical romance. One is that “Romances do not begin by placing their characters in the timeless, mythical space of the fairy tale” but instead locate their stories in a concrete time and place (204). The other, related point is that the readers care about the historical accuracy of the books they’re reading. As she writes, “All of the Smithton women cited the educational value of romances in discussion” although they did not consistently indicate that on the anonymous survey that she administered (108, 107). Radway’s hypothesis is that the educational dimension of historical romance is more often a “justification” when speaking to non-romance readers rather than a primary motivation for readers (107). That said, Dorothy Evans, a bookstore clerk interviewed by Radway, commented that “You don’t feel like you’ve got a history lesson, but somewhere in there you have,” which echoes more contemporary readers and authors of historical romance who extol the genre for what Beverly Jenkins calls “edutainment,” education and entertainment folded together in one story (White).6
eBook - ePub- Gillian Beer(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Epic and Romance, ‘medieval romance passes out of itself’.ELIZABETHAN ROMANCE
The strong emblematic power of the romance genre tended to protect unskilled practitioners. Yet the ideal world of the romances can only find meaningful form through creative precision just because it is ideal. Unless the romance includes a robust particularity there is something specious, something too easily claimed, about its appeal. It resolves into emblems of desire. There is nothing inimical to serious art in the wish to escape the common conditions of life. But wish-fulfilment must be fully, kinetically, acted out with all its attendant pain within the work of art, not proffered like sweetmeats. The suspicion that the romance world is essentially a lie – not only because it is unhistorical but because it is not equivalent to the actual world and not realizable within it – underlies much renaissance and post-renaissance criticism of the form.But Elizabethan critics were concerned particularly by the sheer popularity of the form. It must be emphasized that the word ‘romance’ in the sixteenth century could be used for any kind of secular story in verse or prose. The word reaches its widest spectrum of meaning at this period and it is consequently difficult to use it as a defining or characterizing term; we can, however, usefully distinguish its varieties. The principal sources for Elizabethan romance were the chivalric matter of medieval courtly romance; the vast store of classical legends which had become familiar through the new classical learning; these same legends, translated and transformed by way of Italian and French versions; the Italian ‘romantic epic’; folk-tale; history. The appetite for stories is shown in the jest-books which reflect popular verbal folk tales, books like A Hundred Merry Tales (1526), The Merry Tales of Skelton (1566–9), Tarlton’s Jests (before 1592), and The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607). William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure
eBook - PDFA Companion to Romance
From Classical to Contemporary
- Corinne Saunders(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Nine-teenth-and twentieth-century literary historians, linking the women readers in period references to the mass audiences of their own times, used to imagine a universal feminine taste that stretched from the Greek romance to formula fiction. This feminine taste was said to bloom with the Renaissance English prose romance. ‘‘Since women in general have never subscribed to realism,’’ Louis B. Wright blithely asserted in 1935, ‘‘romance in strange opera lands and love stories with happy endings found favor with the Elizabethans even as with feminine readers today’’ (110). His evidence was the host of references in Renaissance texts to women reading prose romance – references derogatory in anecdotes, satires, and educational treatises, insinu-ating in the romances themselves. In the last generation, this evidence has been reexamined carefully by two overlapping groups: partisans of early fiction recovering its broad appeal, and feminist scholars validating women’s reading experiences. These critics have argued that during the English Renaissance, while romance attracted a large audience of both genders, its association with women readers became a powerful literary convention. Educated men pretended to consign romance to women, displacing ambivalence about a genre long on appeal but short on cultural sanction. When English Renaissance men did admit their own reading or writing of romance, they invoked Horace’s praise of literature that mixes ‘‘profit and pleasure.’’ Yet this commonplace too was polarized along gender lines: ‘‘profit’’ was seen as masculine and ‘‘pleasure’’ feminine; ‘‘profit’’ was linked to romance’s treatment of war, ‘‘pleasure’’ to its treatment of love. Thus, the conventional ‘‘feminization’’ of the romance audience reveals further anxiety about the ‘‘femininity’’ of the reading pleasures it offered.
eBook - PDF- Tim Fulford, Michael E Sinatra, Tim Fulford, Michael E Sinatra(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The Romantic period, she shows, represents a fascinating, transitional moment in the history of the modern museum, while the Regency offers, in microcosm, a compelling dramatization of the tensions informing its emerging cultures of collection and display. T i m F u l f o r d a n d M i c h a e l E . S i n at r a 14 John Gardner concludes The Regency Revisited by examining the end of the Regency. He reads Pierce Egan’s Life in London as a work related to the Regency’s bathetic anti-climax in the Queen Caroline scandal. Dedicating his work to the erstwhile Regent, now King, Egan not only employed George Cruikshank, who was concurrently merci- lessly caricaturing the king, but also reached out to William Hone, who had been the greatest thorn in the king’s side and one of the ablest supporters of the queen and parliamentary reform. Gardner assesses why a Church and King man like Egan would reach out to a radical publisher like William Hone and how, at the Regency’s close, a reorientation of Romantic writing and publishing began to dawn. Notes 1. See, for example, Alan Liu, Wordsworth: the Sense of History, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989; James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. 2. For example, David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 3. Gregory Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Studies of the later Coleridge’s philosophy and religion abound; only one monograph, however, solely examines his later verse: Morton D. Paley’s Coleridge’s Later Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
eBook - ePub- Ralf Haekel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Reeve’s text, which takes the form of a fictional dialogue, thereby itself adopting a classical model, presents modern prose fiction as a continuation of a long tradition of romance writing, spanning from ancient Greek and Roman to Medieval and Early Modern romances. In the course of the Romantic period, similar narratives of descent and development followed with John Moore’s A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance (1797), Miller’s “Romances and Novels” (1803), Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing” (1810a), or John Dunlop’s The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age (1814). The historiographical energy given to the novel reflects the genre’s rising prestige, especially after 1800. To present the public with the pre-history of the contemporary novel constitutes an argument in favour of the genre’s cultural significance and the identification of an honourable line of ancestors lends additional credentials to the genre. Starting with Reeve, most historiographers distinguish between novel and romance: while the romance is a “heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things,” the novel is a “picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written” (1785, I.111). If the romance is conceived of as a precursor of the novel, the transition – if it is evaluated at all – can be conceptualized as progress or decay. Knox, for example, saw the development from romance to novel as a great loss, because the idealizing romances exhibited “patterns of perfection” which “stimulated emulation,” whereas the “wicked characters” (1782, 68–69) to be found in novels incite moral corruption. Reeve, however, regards the transition as progress, an impact of the polite and rational culture of the Augustan age, which transformed the romance into the more refined novel
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