Literature
Romance Fiction
Romance fiction is a genre that focuses on romantic love and relationships. It typically features a central love story and a happy ending. Themes often include love, passion, and emotional connections between characters. Romance fiction can encompass various subgenres, such as historical romance, contemporary romance, and paranormal romance.
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10 Key excerpts on "Romance Fiction"
eBook - PDF- Joanne Hollows(Author)
- 2024(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
70 Women's genres: texts and audiences that it is possible to understand how they undergo transforma- tions in different historical contexts. In attempting to specify the contemporary romance, Radford, like many other critics, draws on John Cawelti's definition of the features of romance. These central features are: a) the central narrative concerns a love rela- tionship; b) the central relationship is between a hero and heroine; c) most romances have a female protagonist; and d) there is a close identification between reader and protagonist (Radford 1986, 8). Radford argues that not only is such a defin- ition useful for thinking about romance writing, it is also useful in 'thinking through the romance element in the mainstream novel' (p. 8). This is an important point but also raises a number of problems. First, while the scope of this definition is quite wide on one hand, it rules out a number of possibilities. For example, by this definition, the idea of a lesbian romance becomes problem- atic: indeed, it is necessary to recognise 'the heterosexism of "classic romance"' (Stacey and Pearce 1995, 20). Second, can clear distinctions be drawn between romantic fiction and 'main- stream' and 'literary' fiction? Indeed, is it desirable to make such distinctions? Third, 'romantic contents' may be as much a product of how the text is read as it is of the text itself. For readers with a knowledge of romance conventions, it is possible to transform novels with minimal 'romantic contents' into romances. These points highlight the fact that romance is a highly complex genre and contains many sub-genres (Taylor 1989b, 59). In the rest of the chapter, a range of ideas about the characteristics of romantic fiction and romance readers will be discussed.
eBook - PDF- M. Makinen(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
2 The Romance There has long been a convention amongst some feminists that Romance Fiction is all the same: with a young, innocent, virginal, heroine who desires but repudiates the attentions of the older, richer, sardonically experienced, hero until he finally proposes. Feminist theoreticians from Tania Modleski in 1982 to Cranny-Francis in 1990 have asserted this view (Cranny-Francis argues that the strong male figure is one of the two main ideas of romance). But others, such as Anderson, Moody and Dixon have focused their study on the genre at specific periods in order to demonstrate a more complex and changing script for Romance Fiction through the century. Their research demon- strates that the kinds of role available to the heroines changed at differing cultural moments, as did the kinds of ‘male object’ that proved popular, and the configurations of what was important for women. Many critics of the romance genre have traced the antecedents for the genre to the works of Richardson, the Brontës and Jane Austen, but I will be following Rachel Anderson’s model 1 of beginning the genre with the more ‘popular’ texts rather than the more literary classics, 2 because these focus on the emotional intensity of love. As Janice Radway’s Smithton romance fans argued, ‘“Not all love stories are romances.” Some are simply novels about love.’ 3 The romance’s formula whether it is a gothic romance, an historical romance, or an erotic romance, concentrates on the emotional intensity of the expe- rience of the protagonist falling in love and carefully prolongs the process of anticipation, bewilderment and desire that she experiences as she is pursued and/or played with by the ‘hero’. 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
- Christine Berberich(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
As a forum which allows for the expression of female ideology, the popular romance is a repository for the evolution of cultural ideals, gender issues and writing conventions. Ultimately, the romance is always about relationships, either about traditional boy-meets-girl relationships or, more recently, homosexual More than a Love Story 67 relationships. They generally focus on a lead couple but can also expand to take in friends and family – as in Chick Lit – or to trace how a couple settles down to start a family, as seen in Sheryl Woods’ The Unclaimed Baby (1999) that discusses issues of family planning and adoption. The romance is always designed to engage the emotions; readers are supposed to laugh, cry and become aroused. Each subgenre of romance, each element of the formula allows for almost infinite iterations. Romance, to put it simply, is more than a mere formula; rather, it is a set of principles, tropes and conventions. It is similar to other popular genres in which evil people are punished and good people are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love. Ultimately, the popular romance reveals how a powerless undervalued section of the population finds empowerment and copes with the hegemonic patriarchy to establish a sense of value and worth. It is a genre where women win. Works Cited Austen, Jane (1813; 1995), Pride and Prejudice . London : Dover. —(1815; 1998), Emma . London: Dover. —(1818; 1997), Persuasion . London: Dover. Beecroft, Alex (2009), False Colors . Philadelphia, PA: Running Press. Brontë, Emily (1847; 2002), Wuthering Heights . London: Penguin Classics. Brook, Meljean (2012), Riveted . New York: Berkeley Sensation. Chase, Loretta (1995), Lord of Scoundrels . New York: Avon. Cixous, Hélène (Summer 1976), ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(4), 875–93. Coulter, Catherine (1988; 2004), False Pretenses . New York: Signet.
eBook - ePubCaught in Play
How Entertainment Works on You
- Peter G. Stromberg(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Stanford University Press(Publisher)
7Romance and the Romantic
AMONG THE CLEAREST EXAMPLES of romantic realism in our society is the romance story itself, whether embodied in a novel, a film, or some other genre. When we engage a romantic story we enter a world in which we glimpse the possibility of a perfect love relationship, we despair over the obstacles in the way of its realization, and in the end we experience a thrill as those obstacles are overcome. Romance holds particular interest for me in this book in that it is a good example of a cultural form seeming so close to our day-to-day world that at times we feel it spills over into mundane reality. This distinguishes the romance from many other varieties of romantic realism. Few of us will ever experience anything approaching being in charge of an intriguing murder investigation or leading a band of adventurers on a quest. But most of us will experience a romantic relationship that contains all the elements of the romantic story: unfulfilled longing, erotic attraction, obstacles to fulfillment, and moments (however brief) of perfect union.In this sense, the romance offers a useful opportunity to examine one of the central ideas of this book, the notion that there are strong affinities between becoming caught up in play and becoming immersed in interaction with other people. After all, the word romance can be used to refer either to a kind of fiction or to one kind of intense interaction in the day-to-day world. What are the implications of this overlap?Perhaps the most obvious question to ask about the overlap between romance and romantic fictions is whether engaging the fictions has any influence over our actual approach to romantic relationships. (If it does, just how does this happen?) In this chapter I take romance as a case study and see if it is possible to be more specific about how playful engagement with romantic fictions and romantic relationships in the day-to-day world intersect.
eBook - PDF- Victorine Lieske, Leslie Wainger(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- For Dummies(Publisher)
They want to iden- tify with the heroine and love the hero. They want to root for the relationship to overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in its path, and at the end of the day, they want an interesting plot that delivers a happy ending. When you meet these expectations and focus on the central romantic relationship, your book becomes a romance novel. (See Chapter 2 for more details on meeting readers’ expectations.) Contrary to popular belief (a belief you’ve probably run up against, if you’ve been a romance reader for a while), romance novels do not follow a prescribed formula. Instead, writers of this genre have a lot of freedom in how these expectations are satisfied. CHAPTER 1 Romance Writing at a Glance 9 Subdividing romances into genres Approximately one-third of all fiction novels sold in the mass market are romance novels, making romance one of the top genres of all time. But not all romances are the same. Within romance publishing in general, all kinds of distinctions exist. Each type of romance comes with its own set of reader expectations that must be met. In Chapter 2, I go into detail about the different types of romances. But every writer needs to know the major distinctions: » Contemporary versus historical romances. The first big decision you need to make — one that affects every page of your novel from first to last — is whether to set your book in the past or the present. • Historical romance: Your readers expect your research — into clothes, everyday life, occupations, social structure, language, and everything else — to be accurate and your characters to behave in ways that are appropriate to their world and its society. (I devote Chapter 13 to research specifics.) Certain story lines and plot twists work perfectly in historical contexts, while others are completely out of place — and it’s your responsibility to know which is which.
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.
- Julie A. Eckerle(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Although the genre was, in its earliest manifestations, written primarily by men, it has long been associated with women because of its focus on love, tendency to digress, seeming encouragement of idle behavior, often scandalous or immoral subject matter (again revolving around love, or lust), and dedications or internal appeals to female readers. 8 This association with women worked in a circular fashion to demean the genre, its writers, and its readers even more. Therefore, whether belittled as trivial or attacked as powerfully dangerous, seductive, and immoral, romance was a genre that—so the moralists would have one believe—“good girls” did not read. Of course, the reality was much more complicated, and numerous studies have addressed the seeming contradiction between this “feminine” genre and the male intellectual world that actually created and marketed it, especially in the sixteenth century. Particularly useful is Helen Hackett’s Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, which traces the progression of women’s relationship to romance from imagined readers to real readers to writers, usefully reminding us that “the female readership came gradually to exist while also being exaggerated for rhetorical and satirical purposes” (67, emphasis added). In “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England,” Lori Humphrey Newcomb garners a wealth of evidence to further debunk the myth of the female reader that was propagated by a “host of references in Renaissance texts to women reading prose romance” (121). This imaginary readership was often said to include, among other frightening scenarios, servant women who would drop all responsibilities and flee with the first available boy upon concluding a romance. But Newcomb exposes a much different reality, arguing that, “while romance attracted a large audience of both genders, its association with women readers became a powerful literary convention
- Ann Brooks(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Evans (1998: 273) is critical of the value of love arguing that: “Far from giving individuals a guide to the expression and articulation of emotional feelings, romance distorts and limits the possibilities of human relationships.” Love in Popular and Literary Fiction One of the key drivers of love was the growth of popular and literary fiction which was the result of the growth of the print media. The impact of roman-tic fiction was both powerful and at the same time devastating. The historian Lawrence Stone comments in this regard: “ . . . the romantic novel of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries has much to answer for in the way of disasterous love affairs and of impudent and unhappy marriages” (Stone 1977: 191). Illouz reflects on the fact that the growth of literary fiction through the print media led to a cultural malaise about the impact of such fiction in creating “a (false) sentiment of love” (Illouz 1998: 162). Illouz uses Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as an example of this malaise and says that it went a step further as she shows: Flaubert’s heroine irreversibly crossed the boundary between “life” and the “novel”, between the sign and its referent and paid with her own life for the confusion between fiction and reality, thus radicalizing the cultural malaise about mass printed romantic fiction. (Illouz 1998: 162) However as Illouz elegantly points out this was not a malaise regarding roman-tic fiction but a contradiction in the nature of love and the failure of the bour -geois family: . . . Madame Bovary’s tragic confusion did not refer to a moral discourse privileging marriage and “true” love over the illusions produced by Narratives of Romantic Love 51 pernicious fiction. In Flaubert’s narrative the power of romantic fiction pointed to the contradictions of the 19th century petit-bourgeois fam-ily, and the increasing centrality of love in the “disenchanted” fabric of everyday life.
- Maureen N. McLane, James Chandler(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
“A novel is a romantic book,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote, because it is a “mixture of storytelling, song and other forms.” 40 Discussion of the novel in Britain for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been far less tolerant of generic instability, a stance that significantly contributed to earlier accounts of the Romantic period as a striking interruption in the otherwise steady “rise of the novel” and as a period almost exclusively devoted to reviving and revising the lyric. Indeed, our bifurcated focus on the novel or the lyric has obscured our understanding of many of the period’s most influential literary forms, including that which arguably gave these years their name: the romance. Romances and tales dominated the contemporary canon as the most pop- ular publications, as well as the best literature of the most respected writers. Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel follows “the plan of the ancient met- rical romance.” His Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field, A Romance in Six Cantos, and Byron’s Childe Harold, A Romaunt, as well as his Oriental tales, such as The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, were all subtitled “romances” or “tales,” as were Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh: An Orien- tal Romance, Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming: A Pennsylvanian Tale, and Robert Southey’s Thalaba, A Rhythmical Romance. Volumes of shorter poems also adopted these generic markers of romance, such as Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales or Felicia Hemans’s Tales, and Historic Scenes, in Verse. And, of course, many “novels” of the period referred to themselves as “romances” or “tales,” as in the case of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, A Romance, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, A National Tale, or The Missionary, An Indian Tale.
eBook - ePub- Gary Kelly(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 7 Conclusion: The Limits of Romantic Fiction The preceding chapters have described the variety of form and motive in British prose fiction from the outbreak of the French Revolution to the death of Britain's modern merry monarch, George IV, and the threshold of major political and institutional transformations in Britain itself. We have seen that fiction was made to serve many functions in the social conflicts and re-alignments of this period, and was made to 'represent' different versions of reality, actual or potential, within the range of interests of those who wrote and read, produced and consumed prose fiction. We have also seen signs of anxiety about the limitations of prose fiction, or the validity of particular novels' representations of subjective and social reality, and about the limits of prose fiction, or fiction's ability to represent actual or potential subjective and social reality at all. As we saw in Chapter 1, anxieties about the limitations of the 'modern novel' were rife in the Romantic period, though gradually diminished by the achievement of novelists such as the English Jacobins, Edgeworth, Austen, and Scott. Such anxiety was directed not so much at the aesthetic as at the moral effect, especially in women readers, of fiction in general and certain 'bad' kinds of fiction in particular - generally, forms of 'romance' and novels of emulation. This anxiety led to various attempts, from Jacobin novels to historical fiction, to reclaim 'the trash of circulating libraries' or merely commercialized fiction for serious moral discourse and social criticism of contemporary life
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