Early Modern British Romance
In this area I will examine the form and
function of early modern British romance in multiple genres from 1480 to 1688. Romance is famously protean. In order to encompass a wide range of romance
texts, most current critics follow Patricia Parker and Barbara Fuchs’ suggestion
that the category of romance is better expressed as a strategy rather than a
genre. According to Fuchs, “the term
describes a concatenation of both narratological elements and literary topoi,
including idealization, the marvelous, narrative delay, wandering, and obscured
identity” (9). This characterization
makes it possible to identify romance elements as they appear in multiple
genres, across literary movements, and in the service of various literary,
cultural, and political endeavors. Viewing
romance as a strategy also allows for the recognition of hybridity and
malleability as romance’s key qualities.
Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne echo this sentiment, calling for “a
more encompassing view of the forest of romance that appreciates both its
magnitude and the dramatic as well as narrative forms that crossbred within its
fertile terrain” (2).
Writers of romance in the early
modern period engaged with classical and medieval texts in order to gain
literary authority. The influence of
these earlier works also gave the early modern romance some of its hybridity;
romance in this period merged the high chivalric ideals of the medieval
imagination with the wide geographic scope of classical epic. Romance also provided a language for the
marvelous encounters and voyages of early modern travel and a powerful
propaganda tool for the enterprises of empire.
The European experience of the New World was dramatically shaped by
romance. Romance not only offered modes
of engagement with the exotic but also packaged the New World as an alluring
commodity. Scholars such as Mary Baine
Cambpell, Mary C. Fuller, Stephen Greenblatt, Peter C. Mancall, Andrew
Hadfield, Joan Pong Linton, Melanie Ord, and Richard Helgerson emphasize how
romance participates in nation-building and how the actions that characterize
most contemporary travel narratives reflect and respond to pre-existing
romantic tropes. The peripatetic nature
of romance narratives and their treatment of the heroic and exotic figure
strongly in the travel accounts of Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Hariot, George
Best, Martin Frobisher, and Richard Hakluyt.
Recent critics have also been interested
in the reception of early modern romances.
Romance literature straddles the divide between popular and aristocratic
readerships. Elite readers in the Renaissance
were scandalized by the popularity of widely printed romances, yet some
romances, such as those by Spenser, Sidney, Tasso, and Ariosto, were seen as
exemplars of high literature. The
astounding numbers of romances that survive in the archives today suggest an
enormous contemporary appetite for these types of narratives: both high and low.
Critics have also honed in on the
political, racial, and engendered nature of romance readership. Examples of this are Elizabeth Spiller’s book
Reading and the History of Race (2011)
that combines ethnic studies, book history and phenomenology to show how
reading was a transformative bodily and humeral experience that could change
what you thought and who you were. She
argues “at a time when more readers were learning about the world and its human
boundaries through their experiences as readers, racial identity was often a
text-based practice” (2). Helen Hackett,
studying of the relationship of women to early modern romance, traces the development
of romance from a genre addressed to women as readers to a genre written by
women. Other critics, such as Margaret
Spufford, trace how the influence of popular literature changed the
subjectivities and expectations of the early modern laboring class. The readers of romance during this period
were a vital part of its development and permeability into other genres.
Romance in the early modern period
influenced a range of burgeoning discourses—from scientific lunar romances like
those of Francis Goodwin and Cyrano de Bergerac to picaresque tales such as
Catalina de Erauso’s Lieutenant Nun. The cross-pollination of romance is important
because it is from these varied genres, alongside the more standard romance,
that new forms of literary pleasure, authority, and narrative structures
arose. The rise of the novel was
particularly indebted to the advent of such transitional romances as Margaret
Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued
Chastity and The Blazing World and
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.
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