Barbara Fuchs, 2004. Romance. London: Routledge. (ISBN 0415-21261-8) Price £ 10.99 (pbk). 146 pp.
Reviewed by Monica Germanà (Roehampton University)
Part of the successful New Critical Idiom series, Barbara Fuchs's Romance leads the reader on a quest through the cultural and historical evolution of the literary genre from its ancient Greek and Roman roots, through its medieval and Renaissance developments and finally arriving to its nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations.
To begin with, Fuchs addresses the problematic issue of romance definitions, incorporating etymological explanations and critical interpretations of the polyvalent 'romance' term. Introducing seminal studies on the topic, Fuchs refers to key ideas in romance criticism including Frederic Jameson's 'conceptual opposition of good and evil' and Northrop Frye's archetypal notions of 'wish-fulfilment' and 'idealization'. While attempting to elucidate the ambiguities inherent in romance theories, Fuchs strategically highlights the challenging nature of such definitions, concluding with her own definition of 'romance', broadly interpreted as a 'literary and textual strategy' [...], a concatenation of both narratological elements and literary topoi, including idealization, the marvellous, narrative delay, wandering, and obscured identity, that [...] both pose a quest and complicate it' (p. 9).
The guide proceeds to trace the classical origins of romance as a lower narrative mode opposed to the higher epic genre, highlighting the earliest examples of romance strategies in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, later to shift the focus on the first autonomous romance manifestations in the Hellenistic romance. The classical background supplied by the first chapter eases the passage to the subsequent stages of romance history. Its medieval evolution is coherently tied to the rise of romance languages and the decline of Latin, before shifting the focus on the links between courtly love and chivalric romance in the literary milieu of medieval France and Anglo-Norman Britain.
The guide succeeds in illuminating the vague contours of romance and providing valuable information on Arthurian and Renaissance romance - including a dedicated section on the unique qualities of Shakespearean romances - in and outside the English literary context. The last chapter of the guide addresses romance in relation to the birth of the modern novel, swiftly moving from the eighteenth-century English romance / novel debate up to the rise of 'genre literature'. The discussed links between romance and other literary modes and periods - e.g. gothic, romanticism, formula romances etc. - are relatively succinct, and, perhaps, more space could have been dedicated to the modern implications of romance.
Like all volumes in the series, Romance targets primarily an undergraduate readership, providing a clear and engaging account of the literary mode's complex definitions, while contextualising romance within the historical ages and literary periods it engages with. Considering the book's nature and its aims, in all likelihood students would have found it even more beneficial for their perusal, if this precious guide had included a glossary, as other volumes in the series do, of relevant terminology - archetype, epic, chansons de geste, courtly love, marvellous, romanticism, etc. - referred to throughout the analysis: a touch of sophistry on this side, perhaps, but based on genuine experience in undergraduate teaching of romance theory.
I thoroughly recommend this text to all students working on any aspect of romance literature - including graduates about to approach research in the field or those searching for a quick-reference text. Indeed, detail and clarity make this an invaluable study guide and an inspiring introduction to the fascinating world of literary romance for any reader.