ABSTRACT
The modernist high-cultural account of romance persisted in postwar literary criticism, which generated a remarkable canon of romance-revival mythographies by poets and scholars such as G. Wilson Knight, Robert Graves, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom. Frye, the most influential of these, composed the apotheosis of romance as a "secular scripture," the total form of all plots and figures, thus the register of the human imagination (1976). More recently, the rhetoric of identity politics has encouraged a recovery of archetypalist criticism from the poststructuralist critique of essentialism; Margaret Doody's True Story of the Novel (1996) is an outstanding recent attempt to recast the history of fiction through a romance typology, now grounded on a female nature (a gentler version of Robert Graves' 1948 White Goddess). Interestingly, Doody repeats the ancient gesture of claiming the legitimate title "novel" by repudiating that of "romance," suggesting that an old story is far from over.
