Acritic songs  

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Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (ca. 1865-70) - Honoré Daumier
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As a literary genre, romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic prose and verse narrative current in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Many medieval romances recount the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability, who, abiding chivalry's strict codes of honour and demeanour, goes on a quest, and fights and defeats monsters and giants, thereby winning favour with a "distant princess". The story of the medieval romance focuses not upon love and sentiment, but upon adventure.

In the early Renaissance romances were the object of ironic, satiric or burlesque treatments. Romances had reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit tastes, but by c.1600 they were ouf of fashion and Miguel de Cervantes famously satirised them in his novel Don Quixote.

From ca. 1800 the connotations of "romance" moved from the magical and fantastic to somewhat eerie "Gothic" adventure narratives. Due to the longevity of its motifs, it is a genre of popular fiction.

Contents

Characteristics of the romance

The term was coined to distinguish popular material in the vernacular (at first the Romance languages French, Portuguese and Spanish, later German, English and others) from scholarly and ecclesiastical literature in Latin.

The boundaries between the romance and the chansons de geste of the troubadours were somewhat fluid. In general, the ballads were the property of professional performers, while the romance was associated more with amateurs and private readers. Nevertheless, a professional poet-performer like Chrétien de Troyes could turn his hand to composing romances. The distinction between an early verse romance and a chanson de geste is often difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to make.

Unlike the novel (nouvelle romaine or "new romance") and like the chansons de geste, the romance dealt with traditional themes, above all three thematic cycles of tales, assembled in imagination at a late date as the Matter of Rome (actually centered on the life and deeds of Alexander the Great), the Matter of France (Charlemagne and Roland, his principal paladin) and the Matter of Britain (the lives and deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, within which was incorporated the quest for the Holy Grail). The Acritic songs (dealing with Digenis Acritas and his fellow frontiersmen) resemble much the chanson de geste, though they developed simultaneously but separately.

A related tradition existed in Northern Europe, and comes down to us in the form of epics, such as Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied. However, the richest set of Germanic Romantic literature comes from Scandinavia in the form of the Fornaldarsagas.

In the later medieval and Renaissance period, the important European literary trend was to fantastic fiction. Exemplary work, such as the English Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (c.1408–1471), and the Spanish/Portuguese Amadis de Gaula (1508), spawned many imitators, and the genre was popularly well-received, producing such masterpiece of renaissance poetry as Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata and other 16th century literary works in the romance genre. But in the judgement of many learned readers of the time, the romance was poor literature, inspiring only broken-down ageing and provincial persons such as Don Quixote, knight of isolated province La Mancha. Hudibras also lampoons the faded conventions of chivalrous romance. Romances had been deemed harmful distractions from more substantive or moral works from the high Middle Ages, in works of piety, but by 1600 most readers would agree.

Many medieval romances recount the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability, who, abiding chivalry's strict codes of honour and demeanour, goes on a quest, and fights and defeats monsters and giants, thereby winning favour with a lady. The story of the medieval romance focuses not upon love and sentiment, but upon adventure; some would call contemporary comic books and science fiction the genre's successors.

The first romances heavily drew on the legends and fairy tales to supply their characters with marvelous powers. The tale of Sir Launfal features a fairy bride from folklore, and Sir Orfeo's wife is kidnapped by the fairy king, and Sir Orfeo frees her from there. These marvelous abilities subside with the development of the genre; fairy women such as Morgan le Fay become enchantresses, and knights lose magical abilities.

Romancers wrote many of their stories in three, thematic cycles: (i) the Arthurian (the lives and deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table); (ii) the Carlovingian (the lives and deeds of Charlemagne, and Roland, his principal paladin); and, (iii) the Alexandrian (the life and deeds of Alexander the Great). In the later medieval and Renaissance period, the important European literary trend was to fantastic fiction. Exemplary work, such as the English Le Morte d'Arthur (c.1469), by Sir Thomas Malory (c.1408–1471), and the Spanish Amadís of Gaul (1508), spawned many imitators, and the genre was popularly well-received.

Originally, this literature was written in Old English and Provençal, later, in French and German—the notable works being King Horn, Havelok the Dane; and Amis and Amiloun; later romances were written as prose, e.g. Le Morte d'Arthur.

Don Quixote (1605, 1615), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), is a satirical story of an elderly country gentleman, living in La Mancha province, who is so obsessed by chivalric romances that he seeks to emulate their various heroes.

Relationship to modern 'romantic fiction'

In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love, such as faithfulness in adversity. From ca. 1800 the connotations of "romance" moved from fantastic and eerie, somewhat Gothic adventure narratives of novelists like Ann Radcliffe's The Sicilian Romance (1790) or The Romance of the Forest (1791) with erotic content to novels centered on the episodic development of a courtship that ends in marriage. With a female protagonist, during the rise of Romanticism the depiction of the course of such a courtship within contemporary conventions of realism, the female equivalent of the "novel of education", informs much Romantic fiction.

The starting point of the fornaldarsagas' influence on the creation of the Fantasy genre is the publication, in 1825, of the most famous Swedish literary work Frithjof's saga, which was based on the Friðþjófs saga ins frœkna, and it became an instant success in England and Germany. It is said to have been translated twenty-two times into English, twenty times into German, and once at least into every European language, including modern Icelandic in 1866. Their influence on authors, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, William Morris and Poul Anderson and on the subsequent modern fantasy genre is considerable, and can perhaps not be overstated.

Modern usage of Romance novel denotes a particular erotic style in a highly conventionalized modern genre, and its sub-genres in historical settings, the well-named "Bodice rippers" produced by teams of authors often writing under joint pseudonyms.

Despite the popularity of this meaning of Romance, other works are still, occasionally, referred to as romances because of their uses of other elements descended from the medieval romance, or from the Romantic movement: larger-than-life heroes and heroines, drama and adventure, marvels that may become fantastic, themes of honor and loyalty, or fairy-tale-like stories and story settings. Shakespeare's later comedies, such as The Tempest or The Winter's Tale are sometimes called his romances.

Northrop Frye's definition

The critic Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) used romance in two separate meanings.

In one, he separated some essentials of romance from the Medieval historical vehicles, to distinguish Romance as a mode that may be detected as a theme or atmosphere in other fictions, one that falls between the mode of "myth" and that of "high mimetic". Expanding Aristotle's Poetics, Frye classified fictions by the power of the hero's actions, which may be greater than ours, or less, or roughly of the same degree. Thus if the hero is superior in kind to men, the action is a myth. If the hero is superior in degree to others and to his environment, the mode is that of Romance, where the actions are marvellous, but the hero is human.

The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability... Romance divides into two main forms: a secular form dealing with chivalry and knight-errantry, and a religious form devoted to legends of saints. Both lean heavily on miraculous violations of natural law for their interest as stories" (Frye pp 33-34).

If, on the other hand, the hero is superior to other men but not to his environment, the tale falls into the mode of high mimetic.

He also divided fictions into the fields of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. In this division, the essential component of romance is adventure, and the central theme is the hero's rescue of a princess from a dragon.

List of romances

Medieval examples:

Romance as a fictive mode: Romance may or may not be realistic depending on the story and its events.




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