Romance

Abstract

The history of the novel, as the preeminent fiction form of the modern world, is so inextricable from the longer history of romance that most languages except English use a single word for all extended prose fictions. In Spanish that single word is no‐vela , but many other languages still draw on the older tradition: der Roman, le roman, il romanzo . This entry, treating “romance” in an encyclopedia of the “novel,” necessarily reflects English‐language usage in distinguishing the two. However, it resists an Anglocentric model of fiction history, dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that defined “novels” as ambitious, avowedly realist, fictions by modern authors (along with a few precursors), while implying that romances were not just formally distinct but developmentally inferior. Today, genre theorists recognize that the line drawn between novel and romance was and is provisional. Romance, then, includes much of the West's non‐novelistic prose fiction, but not just pre‐novelistic prose fiction, for romance did not become an atavism upon the novel's conception. Romances are written and read today not merely as ancestors of the novel; although often set in a version of the past, they are living kin. The romance space outside novelistic normstimeless and boundless, deliberately conventionalized, idealized, even fantasticremains compelling to writers and audiences.