The Romance

This critical study is a fine historical survey of the 'Romance' Beer writes of the Romance as a 'cluster of properties: the themes of love and adventure, a certain withdrawal from their own societies on he part of both reader and romance hero, profuse sensuous detail, simplified characters( often with asuggestion of allegorical significance) a serene intermingling of the unexpected and the everyday, a complex and prolonged successionof incidents usually without a single climax, a happy ending, amplitude of proportions, a strongly enforced code of conduct to which all the characters must comply." In another key passage she speaks of the romance as 'making apparent the hidden dreams of our world' while the novel deals ' with representing and interpreting a known world.' In the course of her survey she writes of the 'Medieval to Renaissance Romance,' ' Cervantes to the Gothic Novel The Romance and the Rise of the Novel' Romanticism and Post- Romantic Romance' In her chapter on Cervantes she shows that despite his rejection of the fantasy of chivalric romance, he uses 'romance- methods of plot construction: He uses interlinked proliferating episodes in which themes apparently long -since relinquished recur after hundreds of pages.' In talking about the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats she considers the way they internalize the Imaginative world which in traditional Romance exists outside the author. She too traces the development of the Romance in Hawthorne. In her conclusion she points to the fact that Romance 'flourished in periods of rapid change, twelvth- century France, Elizabethan England and the end of the eighteenth century. She then discusses the romance elements in science-fiction and in the ' ideal world' of Tolkien. She too discusses the decline of the Romance into 'the insipidity of woman's magazine fiction' And in her concluding paragraph she says that the Romance which deals with the Ideal, thus often has an element of 'Prophecy'. This is an outstanding survey.