Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define. This groundbreaking Companion surveys the many permutations of romance throughout the ages.
* Considers the literary and historical development of the romance genre from its classical origins to the present day
* Incorporates discussion of the changing readership of romance and of romance’s special relation to women readers
* Comprises 30 essays written by leading authorities on different periods and sub-genres
* Challenges the idea that the appeal of romance is exclusively escapist
* Draws on a wide range of specific and influential literary examples
Innehållsförteckning
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction 1
1. Ancient Romance 10
Elizabeth Archibald
2. Insular Beginnings: Anglo-Norman Romance 26
Judith Weiss
3. The Popular English Metrical Romances 45
Derek Brewer
4. Arthurian Romance 65
W. R. J. Barron
5. Chaucer’s Romances 85
Corinne Saunders
6. Malory and the Early Prose Romances 104
Helen Cooper
7. Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England 121
Lori Humphrey Newcomb
8. Sidney and Spenser 140
Andrew King
9. Shakespeare’s Romances 160
David Fuller
10. Chapbooks and Penny Histories 177
John Simons
11. The Faerie Queene and Eighteenth-century Spenserianism
197
David Fairer
12. ”Gothic” Romance: Its Origins and
Cultural Functions 216
Jerrold E. Hogle
13. Women’s Gothic Romance: Writers, Readers, and the
Pleasures of the Form 233
Lisa Vargo
14. Paradise and Cotton-mill: Rereading Eighteenth-century
Romance 251
Clive Probyn
15. ”Inconsistent Rhapsodies”: Samuel
Richardson and the Politics of Romance 269
Fiona Price
16. Romance and the Romantic Novel: Sir Walter Scott 287
Fiona Robertson
17. Poetry of the Romantic Period: Coleridge and Keats 305
Michael O’Neill
18. Victorian Romance: Tennyson 321
Leonée Ormond
19. Victorian Romance: Medievalism 341
Richard Cronin
20. Romance and Victorian Autobiography: Margaret Oliphant,
Edmund Gosse, and John Ruskin’s ”needle to the
north” 360
Francis O’Gorman
21. Victorian Romance: Romance and Mystery 375
Andrew Sanders
22. Nineteenth-century Adventure and Fantasy: James Morier,
George Meredith, Lewis Carroll, and Robert Louis Stevenson
389
Robert Fraser
23. Into the Twentieth Century: Imperial Romance from Haggard to
Buchan 406
Susan Jones
24. America and Romance 424
Ulrika Maude
25. Myth, Legend, and Romance in Yeats, Pound, and Eliot
438
Edward Larrissy
26. Twentieth-century Arthurian Romance 454
Raymond H. Thompson
27. Romance in Fantasy Through the Twentieth Century 472
Richard Mathews
28. Quest Romance in Science Fiction 488
Kathryn Hume
29. Between Worlds: Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, and Romance
502
Clare Morgan
30. Popular Romance and its Readers 521
Lynne Pearce
Epilogue: Into the Twenty-first Century 539
Corinne Saunders
Index 542
Om författaren
Corinne Saunders is a Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham. Her previous publications include The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001) and Chaucer (2001) in the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series.