Romance Genre Research Articles

The awkward truth: failure to romance and the art of decoupling in the films of Hong Sang-soo

ABSTRACTHong Sang-soo’s films are famous for their persistent exploration of failed personal relationships. Hong’s obsessive passion for baring the truth about men and women in contemporary South Korea drives his experiments in narration, minimalist aesthetic, and improvisational style. Hong’s films are the antidote to syrupy date films; stripped of romance, even the occasional meet-cute scenes quickly sour and expire. Sex scenes are awkward and passionless, every chance encounter leading to drunken folly and disillusionment, and rarely do characters actually evolve. It is striking that Hong stubbornly refuses to inject any sentimentality into the meetings of men and women; and yet he appears to be under some compulsion to revisit these same stories again and again. This article approaches Hong’s work as an update and revision of the classical romantic comedy. It prioritizes Hong’s candid look at human weaknesses and insecurities and how he seeks to dismantle any idealized vision of two perfect strangers coming together happily. By bracketing Hong’s films as a deconstruction of the long-standing traditions that mythologize true love, the article identifies the dialogic relationship of these films to the romantic comedy genre, and interprets their idiosyncratic structure and style as an explicit critique of modern love.

'And in the midst of those words shot him': Satire and the Virtue of Romance in 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity'

As its title suggests, Margaret Cavendish's 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity' interrogates female virtue and the ways in which prose romance's generic structures depend on it. While silence and obedience were often subordinate to chastity, early modern conduct manuals ask women to uphold these and other virtues simultaneously. Early modern prose romances, however, demonstrate the difficulty of doing so. In taking up the romance genre, Cavendish satirizes the importance of chastity for the virtue of real and imagined women alike in order to renegotiate conventionally female roles in romance, and, by extension, their allegorical representations of active moral and political agents.

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England by Diane Cady

Reviewed by: The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England by Diane Cady Rosemary O'Neill Diane Cady. The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. ix, 189. $84.99 cloth; $69.99 e-book. This innovative, engaging study explores how gender and economics are mutually reinforcing discourses in the literature of late medieval England, a time before the bifurcation of political economy from domestic economy [End Page 393] (a change Cady locates in the eighteenth century) occluded their interdependence (7). The book analyzes a wide range of poems in Middle English, from works by Chaucer and Gower to anonymous romances, to uncover a set of interlocking representations of gender and money. In text after text, Cady finds that wealth is a masculine prerogative, while poverty is emasculating; women are objects for possession, simultaneously untrustworthy and fickle like money itself. As she persuasively argues, these insights hold profound implications for how to think about both gender and economics, in the medieval period and also in the present day. Taking as its focus "gender as ideology" rather than embodied gender, Cady's analysis is particularly indebted to the work of Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" [1977]) and Jean-Joseph Goux (Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud [1973, trans. 1990]). The influence of the former resonates most strongly in the book's organization around narratives of heterosexual courtship, in which men's relationships to material goods are negotiated through their relationships to women, and vice versa. In the introduction, Cady situates her argument within the rich vein of recent work in Middle English on economics and literature (4). Yet in blending historicism with psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches, the book also harkens back to the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s (6). Chapter 2, the first body chapter, elaborates two main claims: "Money and women have a similar nature, one that is marked by instability and movement," and "the link between erotic and fiscal possession in the medieval cultural imaginary [is crucial to] the construction of male identity" (13). To develop these claims, Cady explores medieval theories of reproduction as well as monetary value, before offering a series of close readings that illustrate the fickle qualities of female characters and their role as repositories of value in a series of representative texts, including the Lady Meed episode of Piers Plowman, Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal, and The Reeve's Tale. The book's third chapter attends to a single text, the anonymous late medieval/Tudor romance The Squire of Low Degree, to explore how the text "enact[s] … fiscal and sexual fantasies" (33) that are essentially intertwined as the Squire seeks both love and money in the King of Hungary's court. Cady reads the king's daughter's seven-year retreat to her chamber in the company of a dead body as a refusal to participate in the erotic economy in lieu of a more transgressive expression of libidinal energy. The daughter ultimately returns to circulation through her [End Page 394] father's power, revealing both a conservative gender ideology that reserves power and wealth for the sovereign patriarch, and the conservatism of the romance genre more generally. Chapter 4 announces a new section, which turns to the notion of value itself and "how gendered notions of economy inform the ways we think about value, especially in realms that the West often treats as 'value free' or beyond economy, such as friendship, love, and poetics" (51). The three chapters that follow are an especially coherent and successful section of the book, perhaps because they mark a concurrent narrowing in focus to the nature of masculinity within the gendered economy. The fourth chapter, on Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum, takes up friendship and its discontents within the context of the interested exchanges of goods that the characters' livelihoods comprise. The flow of goods between the narrative's two merchants allows us to chart an anxious masculinity, hemmed in by dangers: to trade in goods is to risk loss, yet to be too free with...

«Рапсодія», «Скерцо» та «Балада» для фортепіанного квартету Йозефа Маркса: пізньоромантичні принципи формоутворення

У статті розглянуто «Рапсодію», «Скерцо» та «Баладу» для фортепіанного квартету австрійського композитора Йозефа Маркса (1882–1964). Проаналізовані стильові та світоглядні зв’язки даного твору з пізнім романтизмом. Встановлено, що всі три частини утворюють єдиний камерно-інструментальний цикл: об’єднавчими факторами виступають інтонаційно-драматургічні зв’язки, а також прийом синтезування стильових елементів різних музично-історичних епох. Так, в «Рапсодії» перевтілені основні риси симфонічних поем Ф. Ліста, «Скерцо» та «Балада» синтезують елементи романтичного скерцо, бахівської поліфонії та побутової музики Відня. Виявлені риси індивідуального стилю Й. Маркса, серед яких – епічні масштаби композиції, вишукана гармонічна мова, майстерне володіння ансамблевою фактурою.

Fragile feeling

Abstract Where analyses of the city as a landscape often visualize 'urban-ness' through images of tall buildings and concrete, this article thinks about how the genre of romance might turn our attention to other genres of city-as-landscape. I offer Johannesburg from this orientation through a reading of its history as a 'Secret Garden'. Most romance genres rely on a temporal closure of 'happily-ever-after', but here I am interested in other possible endings. This reading of romance I draw from account of romance as a temporal relation to anticolonial struggle. The article examines Kagiso Lediga's 2018 film, Catching Feelings. The film is framed around the narrative of the 'cuckold', which I argue articulates the libidinal economy between the protagonist Max and his friend, Heiner. This libidinal economy is also presented through the landscape of the city. While more accurately defined as a film within the genre of 'bro' or 'lad lit', what Lediga's film does share with chick lit is the way that it borrows from the form of the fairy tale. Through this fairy tale, I locate emergent and continuous forms of masculinity in a history of Johannesburg's landscape through the visual language of the domesticated forest. Through the cuckold as a fairy tale, Lediga offers the city not simply as the place of the action, but as an object of desire, or of fantasy that makes his fragile protagonist 'strange'.

Materialización y metapoética desde las novelas caballerescas a la épica colonial

This contribution analyses analogies between the genres of chivalric romance and colonial epics, regarding the presence of a dominant material culture which is linked to metapoetical aspects. If the ‘orientalist’ romance Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell (1490) and Alonso de Ercilla’s epic La Araucana (1569-1597) are supposed to share an aspiration for self-affirmation and for the appropriation of land and goods, this ‘materialism’ goes along with the exposition of writing itself within the narrated world. Paradoxically, this concretion or materialization of the metapoetic does not lead to the ‘materia’, the concrete matter of the conquests. In Tirant, the text escapes to an artificial world of simulacrum, and the notion of hyper-reality (Baudrillard) hides the hero’s violent aspirations. In La Araucana, the fetish of writing dissimulates the violence of colonization. However, the araucans textually oppose to the fetishism of writing –by defending a logics of expense (Bataille) as an alternative to the accumulation of material and of writing.

Book Review: Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction

Part reference book, part readers’ advisory, and completely entertaining to browse, the Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction’s selective set of entries illustrates the breadth of the romance genre while acknowledging its reach, from early literature to today’s publishing industry. The market share of popular romance indicates the public’s enduring interest and demonstrates a need for supplementary resources for general readers or those beginning research in romance-related topics. Academic study of this popular reading material is increasing, with special issues and at least one peer-reviewed journal devoted to the topic and recognition within disciplines including literature, women’s and gender studies, and popular culture.

Depiction of Human Tragedy in Literary Works

Nickolas Nickleby is a romantic novel written by Charles Dickens, one of the prominent English writer of Elizabethan era remembered as the greatest novelist with his literary contributions in the form of novels, short stories, poetry and plays. Famous works among his numerous writings include “A Message from the Sea”, “Great Expectations”, “Oliver Twist”, and “A Tale of Two Cities”.Nicholas Nickleby is one of examples of the romantic genre in Charles Dickens works and it is his third novel. This novel explores the life and adventures of a young man named Nicholas Nickleby, who has to support his mother and sister, due to unexpected failure of his father. Nicholas Nickleby’s father loses his entire life savings and this results in his death. The family leaves from the comfortable life style and reaches their relative for support. The work shows real human tragedy which is analysed in this article. Keywords : Human tragedy, sense of moral val

“A Boy Inside It”

This essay explores Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp series “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles” through the lens of trans studies, placing her eponymous hero in conversation with the inversion rhetoric of sexological discourse and the transgender pulp novels that circulated alongside Bannon’s texts in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo’s masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness—now widely read as a transgender text—Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary canons. Revisioning Beebo as a transmasculine character transforms our understanding of an unfolding trans-gender literary tradition, offering a bridge between Hall’s Stephen Gordon and later twentieth-century articulations of transmasculine identity and embodiment. Further, the essay suggests that Bannon’s series provides a vital intervention in the “case study” framing that dominated both transgender pulp novels and The Well by offering a vision of trans experience that, presented in the romance genre, exists outside medical authority. If we broaden the context for studying Beebo to include other contemporary trans literary genealogies, Bannon’s work becomes integral to understanding the pulp genre’s treatment of transgender themes and the reach of transgender plots and possibilities at midcentury.

Imagen fílmica y narración. Análisis cinematográfico de Sensatez y sentimientos (Ang Lee, 1995)

The film Sense and Sensibility of Ang Lee (USA, 1995) narrates one of the literary works of the British writer Jane Austen (1775-1817), who is not only most famous for writing under the domain of drama and romance genres (Bergan, 2011), but specifically has written about women in 19th-century England facing problems related to their social position and relations. We wonder the following: “how the sensibility and senses in the Victorian Era is materialized in the narrative of Ang Lee (1995)?” Therefore, this film study will investigate how the roles of cinematographic language (Martin, 2002) and elements of narrative analysis (Casetti y Di Chio, 2003); (Stam, 2014) are used in scenes and/or sequences (Aumont y Marie, 2009). Our purpose is to further understanding how feelings like sense and sensibility (Sellés, 2010) are materialized through three aspects in the film: the characters and the narrative language of the cinema (Aumont y Marie, 2009).

Confessional as an Emotional Component of Russian Music (On the Example of Romance and Song)

The article deals with the emotional facets of Russian romance and song, in particular, such components as confessional. Russian song and romance literary and musical potential and the means that form the confessional beginning of this genre are analyzed. The article considers the origins of Russian romance and song formation, their connection with Church music, which largely influenced the formation of the confessional beginning of this genre. Special attention is paid to the work of S. Y. Lemeshev - the performer who raised the genre of Russian romance and song to a qualitatively new level and revealed the spiritual potential of Chaikovsky's romances and vividly embodied their confessional. Russian vocal music, whose spiritual, historical and aesthetic value is not in doubt, is the necessity of a comprehensive study of the article; the unexplored nature of the topic; the disclosure of new aspects relating to Russian romances and songs, their performance.

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

«Actual intoning» in the vocalperforming practice of Tetiana Vierkina (based on the romance repertory)

«Actual intoning» in the vocalperforming practice of Tetiana Vierkina (based on the romance repertory)

Narrative genres of Brexit: the Leave campaign and the success of romance

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the Leave narrative was successful in the 2016 referendum in part because it conformed to one of the well-established narrative genres of tragedy, comedy, satire and romance. These genres are story telling conventions that orientate audiences and guide the interpretation of the story being told. Specifically, the article shows that the Leave campaign constructed a largely consistent romantic narrative, while the Remain campaign mixed narrative genres. This difference in ‘genre consistency’ contributed to the success of Leave and the failure of Remain in the referendum. The investigation into the role of genre consistency adds to theoretical scholarship on narrative dominance in political discourse which has so far focused on the narrator, the structure and content of the story or the audience. The analysis points to structural similarities between the romantic genre and populist narratives more generally which enables populism to tap into the power of romance.

The Monstrous Birth of Alexander the Great

Alone among the French romances of Alexander the Great penned in the twelfth century, Thomas de Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie reproduces the story of Alexander’s illegitimate birth from the principal Latin source. According to this account, Alexander’s father was Nectanabus, a mage and astrologer who seduced Queen Olympias with an astronomy lesson, deceived her by using animal pelts to disguise himself as a god, and then used his magic arts to retard the child’s birth when his astrological calculations indicated the child would be born a hybrid man-beast. Thomas wrote his romance at the very moment when both astrology and paradoxography (the writing of marvels) were being reevaluated as means of understanding the world, and so Alexander’s odd birth offers a reflection — shaped by the romance genre — on the limitations and ethical implications of medieval natural science.

Figures in the Landscape

Across a range of medieval French texts—from the genres of romance, lai, and hagiography—scenes are found involving the discovery and scrutiny of a puzzling, hairy entity that cannot speak for itself, existing outside the confines of human civilization. These figures might turn out to be a beast, a nobleman, a saint, a murderer, or—more unsettlingly—many of these at once. These scenes are susceptible to a reading which calls upon a theoretical model drawn from the works of Bruno Latour and Karen Barad, for whom nature, culture, humanity, animality, the organic, and the inorganic are all different understandings of entanglements of matter and agency, expressed across a range of beings and becomings. From this perspective, these ambiguous creatures are read as figures which represent extremes of humanity and inhumanity, posing questions about that dichotomy and its relation to nature, and revealing the contingency of nature as an artificially constructed category.

“Whate’er These Words Cannot Express”: In Memory of Michael O’Neill

“Whate’er These Words Cannot Express”: In Memory of Michael O’Neill

ФОРТЕПІАННИЙ РОМАНС: ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ЖАНРОВОЇ СТИЛІСТИКИ

In the studies of Ukrainian scholars about the piano music the special attention to the genre of piano romance was not drawn. Therefore, the article attempts to investigate the figurative and stylistic features of this genre in the piano creativity of Ukrainian composers.The genre fund of the Ukrainian piano music is rich and diverse. Lyrical instrumental genres occupy an outstanding place in it. Piano romance is similar to piano song, which is widely represented in works of the Ukrainian composers of different generations. A song was mentally closer to them. It is noted that the vocal romance, which originates from the author’s song of the urban tradition, differed in certain stylistic peculiarities, which were partly transferred to a piano piece. The article deals with the pieces named “Romance” written by Russian and Ukrainian composers of the second part of the nineteenth century to our time. It has been mentioned that piano romances were more characteristic of the representatives of the Russian national school and the Ukrainian composers from Naddnipryanshchyna. The Galician composers didn’t pay much attention to this genre; Ukrainian folk songs in piano arrangement prevailed in their work.The analyzed piano romances composed by the Ukrainian authors are the examples of romantic (M. Kalachevskiy, M. Lysenko) and neo-romantic (M. Lastovetskiy) national styles and the corresponding figurative-emotional circle. The main peculiarities of the genre stylistics of these works are: sincerity of feelings, exaggerated expression and some sentimentality at the same time. Singing is combined with narration, or recitative. For the development of musical material such techniques as sequencing, the presence of several climaxes, harmonic-texture variation, agogic nuances, three-part form, sometimes with contrasting parity of parts are typically used. Thanks to these piano romances are often performed in concert programs; they are popular in the educational repertoire.

Neo historical fiction: David Mitchell’s take on adventure, empire and the exoticization of the past

This essay is concerned with a new conception of historical fiction that emerged in the British literary scene at the turn of the 21st century, and which Elodie Rousselot has termed neo-historical, having developed on premises similar to neo-Victorian fiction. This variety embraces a narrative realist mode and participates in the taste for popular engagement in public history. The analysis departs from a consideration of the implications of these critical approaches to historical fiction, in as much as they move backwards, beyond their postmodern foundations, and intersect with the genre of historical romance. This article uses David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet(2010) as a case-study in the light of Mitchell’s own conceptualization of the genre of historical fiction. The novel combines a meta-realist approach with the exoticisation of the past and the exploration fictional subjectivities and an awareness of post-imperialist concerns in a globalized world.

Soziale Netzwerkanalysen zum mittelhochdeutschen Artusroman oder: Vorgreiflicher Versuch, Märchenhaftigkeit des Erzählens zu messen

Abstract This article discusses the question of how complex the narrations of Arthurian romances are by comparing them to the ‘simple form’ of fairy tales. In order to achieve this, we identify properties of the European folktale, which we then compare with an Arthurian text corpus consisting of Hartmann von Aue’s ‘Erec’ and ‘Iwein’ as well as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ‘Parzival’. The typological investigation is carried out using data-driven methods, primarily Social Network Analysis, and focuses on various aspects of characters. By doing this, we gain an in-depth understanding of the relationships between Arthurian romances and fairy tales and of the differences within the genre of the Arthurian romance itself. We show that the results of statistical analysis refuse clear interpretation, thus providing new insights into the well-known objects.