Romance Writing

Front Cover
Polity, Jan 5, 2007 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 214 pages
Romance Writing explores the changing nature of both the romance genre and the discourse of romantic love from the seventeenth century to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the first studies to approach romantic love as both genre and discourse in more than sixty years.

Faced with the challenge of writing a cultural history for what is commonly understood to be one of lifes most universal, a-historical and cross-cultural phenomena, Lynne Pearce has invoked the concept of the gift to calculate loves added value at different cultural/historical moments. Building upon those philosophical traditions which have argued for the powerfully transformative nature of romantic love, Pearce shows how in the history of literature lovers have utilized its spark to change not only themselves, but also their worlds, through acts of creativity and heroism. The gift of love ranges from the simple gift of a name in the seventeenth century, through notions of immortality, self-sacrifice and selfhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through to the liberating temporal and spatial dislocations of the postmodern age. The opening chapter, The Alchemy of Love, also undertakes an in-depth engagement of the changing nature, and meaning, of romantic love.

Providing a judicious blend of close reading and cultural history, Romance Writing will be essential reading for undergraduate students as well as postgraduates and scholars working in the field, while also offering much of interest to the general reader.

From inside the book

Contents

The Alchemy of Love
1
Romance before the Eighteenth Century
29
Courtship Romance
56
Gothic Romance
83
Wartime Romance
110
Modern Romance
135
Postmodern Romance
161
Notes
189
References
196
Index
208
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About the author (2007)

Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary Theory and Women’s Writing, University of Lancaster

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