Experiments with the Romance Form and the Receding Baroque: Aretina, The English Lovers, and Eliana

Abstract

:This article examines creative experimentations with prose fiction in three British romances published at the onset of the Restoration period: Aretina, The English Lovers, and Eliana—unfairly underrated, even ignored, by critics despite their explicit vernacular distinction. As imitations of the French heroic romance, they were imbued with Baroque aesthetics, but tried to naturalise and update the genre in their respective ways. In Aretina, George Mackenzie not only employed metafictional strategies and devices to question and overcome the invogue romance form, but also displayed other literary traits which may qualify the result as Gothic Baroque. John Dauncey's The English Lovers culled its story from the national drama to pioneer the novelisation of a play (Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West) into the heroic-romance form, entailing new ways of handling verisimilitude, history, and language in prose fiction. Similarly, Eliana's innovations sought to modernise and simplify the Baroque romance. Though these three works did not directly influence the development of English fiction, they reveal the state of narrative experimentation in the early 1660s (at times incipiently announcing the novel) and the burgeoning of the vernacular mainstream of fiction in matter and taste.