ABSTRACT
Like comic fiction, which I discussed in Chapter 3, romantic and erotic writing surfaces in every type of genre. Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is a love story between two cowboys, combining a realist account of life on the range with a doomed homosexual romance. William Gibson’s ‘New Rose Hotel’ (in Burning Chrome) is an elegy for a lost cyberlover. We have already seen how Angela Carter brings out the eroticism underlying the traditional folk tale in ‘The Company of Wolves’ (Chapter 4). The three core examples in this chapter achieve widely vary ing effects through romantic or erotic subject matter. ‘Death Constant Beyond Love’ by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez is a tightly compressed narrative evoking intense physical desire through sensual description. Chekhov’s ‘Lady with Lapdog’ takes a wryly comic approach to an adulterous affair which has surprising consequences. The contem porary American writer Rebecca Brown subverts conventional romantic symbolism in her lesbian revenge fantasy, ‘Dr Frankenstein, I Presume’.
