"}},"i":0}}]}" id="mwAig">
consistently subverts the romantic narrative. Our first encounter with Heathcliff shows him to be a nasty bully. Later, Brontë puts in Heathcliff's mouth an explicit warning not to turn him into a Byronic hero: After ... Isabella elop[es] with him, he sneers that she did so "under a delusion ... picturing in me a hero of romance". [59]
Emily Brontë was influenced by Walter Scott, the gothic novel, and romanticism more broadly. [61] [62]
Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing about A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance in the New York Times, noted that what he describes as the "wonderfully extravagant novel" is "pointedly subtitled 'A Romance'." [63] He says it is at once "a detective story" and "an adultery novel." [63]
Many famous literary fiction romance novels, unlike most mass-market novels, end tragically, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, Atonement by Ian McEwan, and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. [64] [65]
Genre fiction romance novels, first developed in the 19th century, started to become more popular after the First World War. In 1919, E.M. Hull's novel The Sheik was published in the United Kingdom. The novel, which became hugely popular, was adapted into a movie (1921). [66]
The mass market version of the historical romance, is seen as beginning in 1921, when Georgette Heyer published The Black Moth. This is set in 1751, but many of Heyer's novels were inspired by Jane Austen's novels and are set around the time Austen lived, in the later Regency period. Because Heyer's romances are set more than 100 years earlier, she includes carefully researched historical detail to help her readers understand the period. [67] Unlike other popular love-romance novels of the time, Heyer's novels used the setting as a major plot device. Her characters often exhibit twentieth century sensibilities, and more conventional characters in the novels point out the heroine's eccentricities, such as wanting to marry for love. [68]
In the 1930s the British publishers Mills & Boon began releasing hardback romance novels. The books were sold through weekly two-penny libraries. In the 1950s the company began offering the books for sale through newsagents across the United Kingdom. [69]
The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s. [70] Its literary forebears included the melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, it also drew on the Gothic and romantic genres of fiction. [71] Whereas romance and realism had traditionally been contradictory modes of literature, they were brought together in sensation fictionof the Victorian era – combining "romance and realism" in a way that "strains both modes to the limit". [72] [73] The loss of identity is seen in many sensation fiction stories because this was a common social anxiety. [74]
Sensation fiction is commonly seen to have emerged as a definable genre in the wake of three novels: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60); Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood's East Lynne (1861); and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862). [75] Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861) is another example. [76]
Critic Don D'Ammassa defines the adventure fiction genre as follows:
An adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work. [77]
D'Ammassa argues that adventure fiction makes the element of danger the focus; hence he argues that Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed, whereas Dickens's Great Expectations is not because "Pip's encounter with the convict is an adventure, but that scene is only a device to advance the main plot, which is not truly an adventure." [77]
The standard plot of Medieval romances was a series of adventures. Following a plot framework as old as Heliodorus, and so durable as to be still alive in Hollywood movies, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady. A separation would follow, with a second set of adventures leading to a final reunion.
Variations kept the genre alive. From the mid-19th century onwards, when mass literacy grew, adventure became a popular subgenre of fiction. Although not exploited to its fullest, adventure has seen many changes over the years – from being constrained to stories of knights in armor to stories of high-tech espionages. Examples of that period include Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, père, [78] Jules Verne, Brontë Sisters, H. Rider Haggard, Victor Hugo, [79] Emilio Salgari, Louis Henri Boussenard, Thomas Mayne Reid, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Rider Haggard (1856–1925), author of King Solomon's Mines ("romantic adventure"), [80] She: A History of Adventure , was an English writer of adventure fiction set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the lost world literary genre. [81] He was "part of the literary reaction against domestic realism that has been called a romance revival." [82] Other writers following this trend were Robert Louis Stevenson, George MacDonald, and William Morris. [82] Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote romances, including historical romances, in which adventure is often a prominent element ("adventure, heroism, chivalry", amongst other things, are associated with the word "romance" according to the OED). These include Treasure Island (1883) – an adventure novel about piracy and buried treasure; Prince Otto (1885) – an action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state; Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) – A kind and intelligent physician turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality (a gothic novel); Kidnapped (1886) – an historical novel; The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888) – an historical adventure novel and romance set during the Wars of the Roses, and The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale (1889) – a tale of revenge, set in Scotland, America and India.
genius was his ability to create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air. Originality was Wells's calling card. In a six-year stretch from 1895 to 1901, he produced a stream of what he called "scientific romance" novels, which included The Time Machine , The Island of Doctor Moreau , The Invisible Man , The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon .
In the United Kingdom, Wells's work was a key model for the British "scientific romance", and other writers in that mode, such as Olaf Stapledon, [84] J. D. Beresford, [85] S. Fowler Wright, [86] and Naomi Mitchison, [87] all drew on Wells's example. Wells was also an important influence on British science fiction of the period after the Second World War, with Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss expressing strong admiration for Wells's work. [88] [89] The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance, by English writer Christopher Priest, published in 1976, is another work influenced by Wells. This novel effectively combines the storylines of the H.G. Wells novels The War of the Worlds (1898) and The Time Machine (1895) into the same reality. Action takes place both in Victorian England and on Mars.
In an interview with The Paris Review , Vladimir Nabokov described Wells as his favourite writer when he was a boy and "a great artist." [90] He went on to cite The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica , The Time Machine, and The Country of the Blind as superior to anything else written by Wells's British contemporaries. Nabokov said: "His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasies are superb." [90]
As noted, many European languages do not distinguish romances from novels. In France, for example, le roman is the term used for a novel.
Though Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, Brian Aldiss has argued that it should be considered the first true science fiction story. [91] (See H. G. Wells's scientific romance above).
R. D. Blackmore described Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor, (1869) in his preface, as a romance and not a historical novel, because the author neither "dares, nor desires, to claim for it the dignity or cumber it with the difficulty of an historical novel." As such, it combines elements of traditional romance, of Sir Walter Scott's historical novel tradition, of the pastoral tradition, of traditional Victorian values, and of the contemporary sensation novel trend. [92]
Thomas Hardy classified his novels under three headings: "novels of character and environment", such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles ; "novels of ingenuity", such as A Laodicean ; "romances and fantasies", such as A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873); The Trumpet-Major (1880); Two on a Tower: A Romance (1882); A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories); The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892)
Amongst twentieth-century writers of romance are Joseph Conrad, Mary Webb, and John Cowper Powys. Joseph Conrad wrote Romance (1905), and The Rescue, A Romance of the Shallows (1920). Literary critic John Sutherland refers to Mary Webb as the pioneer of the genre of "soil and gloom romance". [93]
John Cowper Powys describes Walter Scott's romances, as "by far the most powerful literary influence of my life". [94] In A Glastonbury Romance Powys makes use of Arthurian mythology, and the Holy Grail story. Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages is set during the end of Roman rule in Britain, with King Arthur, Myrddin (Merlin), Nineue (Lady of the Lake), and two survivors of an ancient race of giants. When John Cowper Powys began Owen Glendower in April 1937 he referred to it in his diary, as "my Romance about Owen Glyn Dwr ", [95] but then, in subsequent years, he generally referred to it as a historical novel, and it was so sub-titled when it was published. [96]
The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea is an early historical romance by James Fenimore Cooper. Its subject is the life of a naval pilot during the American Revolution. It is often considered the earliest example of nautical fiction in American literature. A sailor by profession, Cooper had undertaken to surpass Walter Scott's Pirate (1821) in seamanship. Cooper's most famous romance is Last of the Mohicans . According to Susan Fenimore Cooper, Cooper first conceived the idea for the book while visiting the Adirondack Mountains in 1825 with a party of English gentlemen. [97] The party passed through the Catskills, an area with which Cooper was already familiar, They passed on to Lake George and Glens Falls. Impressed with the caves behind the falls, one member of the party suggested that "here was the very scene for a romance." Cooper promised "that a book should be written, in which these caves should have a place; the idea of a romance essentially Indian in character then first suggesting itself to his mind." [98] Cooper has been called the "American Walter Scott." [99] Critic Georg Lukacs likened Fenimore Cooper's character Bumppo in the Leatherstocking Tales to Sir Walter Scott's "middling characters; because they do not represent the extremes of society, these figures can serve as tools for the social and cultural exploration of historical events, without directly portraying the history itself". [100]
In the mid–nineteenth century Hawthorne and Melville wrote romances. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850); The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance ; The Blithedale Romance . Herman Melville described Moby-Dick (1851) as a romance in a letter of June 27 to his English publisher:
My Dear Sir, — In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. [101]
In the twentieth century Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. Her stories usually focus on morally flawed characters, frequently interacting with people with disabilities or disabled themselves (as O'Connor was), while the issue of race often appears. Most of her works feature disturbing elements. [102]
E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror. [103] [104] Ludwig Tieck, Heinrich von Kleist, and E. T. A. Hoffmann "also profoundly influenced the development of European Gothic horror in the nineteenth century". [105]
Hoffmann's novel The Devil's Elixirs (1815) was influenced by Lewis's The Monk and even mentions it. The novel also explores the motif of the Doppelgänger, the term coined by another German author and supporter of Hoffmann, Jean Paul, in his humorous novel Siebenkäs (1796–1797). [106]
Balzac was an inheritor of Walter Scott's style of the historical novel, [107] publishing in 1829 Les Chouans , a historical work in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, [108] set in 1799 Brittany. This was subsequently incorporated into La Comédie Humaine . The bulk La Comédie Humaine, however, takes place during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, and Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. [109] Séraphîta , with its theme of androgyny, contrasts with the realism of most of the author's best known works, delving into the fantastic and the supernatural to illustrate philosophical themes.
Amongst writers of adventure novels were Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Louis Henri Boussenard. Dumas was the author of The d'Artagnan Romances, which includes The Three Musketeers , which is also a historical novel. Jules Verne (1828–1905) was the author a series of bestselling novels that includes Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always very well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.
Louis Henri Boussenard (1847–1910) ) was dubbed "the French Rider Haggard" during his lifetime, but better known today in Eastern Europe than in Francophone countries. Boussenard's best-known book Le Capitaine Casse-Cou (1901) was set at the time of the Boer War. L'île en feu (1898) fictionalized Cuba's struggle for independence. Aspiring to emulate Jules Verne, Boussenard also turned out several science fiction novels, notably Les secrets de monsieur Synthèse (1888) and Dix mille ans dans un bloc de glace (1890), both translated by Brian Stableford in 2013 under the title Monsieur Synthesis. [110] [ circular reference ]
Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is a gothic, historical novel.
Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827) is an historical novel set in Lombardy in 1628, during the years of Spanish rule, which has similarities with Walter Scott's historic novel Ivanhoe , although evidently distinct. Georg Lukàcs, in The Historical Novel (1969) comments:
Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) was a writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction. [111] Many of his most popular novels have been adapted as comics, animated series and feature films. He is considered the father of Italian adventure fiction and Italian pop culture, and the "grandfather" of the Spaghetti Western. [112]
Walter Scott was perhaps more popular in Russia, "in the late 1820s and 1830s", than anywhere "on the Continent", through the French translations of Auguste- Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret. Amongst "pilgrims to Abbotsford [were] a large proportion of Russian writers, diplomats, soldiers." [113]
Walter Scott "very profoundly influenced" Pushkin, "in his capacity [as] a poet, ... a collector of folk-songs and ... the originator of the historical novel based on life ... We know that Pushkin's library contained not only Walter Scott's novels, but also his poetical works". [114]
Tolstoy's "great-great-grandson Vladimir Tolstoy, 36, inspected the recently renovated Scott Monument in Edinburgh and suggested that "without the inspiration of Scott's writing genius his famous ancestor might never have penned War and Peace". "Mr Tolstoy ... the director of the Leo Tolstoy Museum and president of the Russian Museums' Association, said his great-great grandfather drew great inspiration from Scott's novels, particularly Waverley, Ivanhoe, and Rob Roy." He also noted that "In the library of the Tolstoy Museum in Russia there are many of Scott's books, including some early editions". He "said some of Scott's books in the museum's library had comments written by Leo Tolstoy beside the text - but he would not reveal what they said". [115]
The historical novel developed in imitation of Walter Scott (80 of his works had been translated). The most notable Spanish authors are: Enrique Gil y Carrasco 1815–1846, the author of El señor de Bembibre, the best Spanish historical novel, written in imitation of Scott; Francisco Navarro Villoslada (1818–1895), who wrote a series of historical novels when the romantic genre was in decline and Realism was coming to be at its height. His novels were inspired by Basque traditions, and were set in the medieval era. His most famous work is Amaya, o los vascos en el siglo VIII (Amaya, or the Basques of the 8th century), in which the Basques and the Visigoths ally themselves against the Muslim invasion. Other authors include Mariano José de Larra, Serafín Estébanez Calderón and Francisco Martínez de la Rosa.