ABSTRACT
Two things may be said immediately about the romance: it has an old and honoured place in literary history, and it spans the division between literature and paraliterature that was introduced in the previous chapter. The intrinsic popularity of romance influences almost every critical judgment that is made upon this branch of writing. Contemporary romances have in most ages been viewed with a certain contempt. Pleasing but not instructive, dulce but not utile, they have been targets of moral disapproval from the time of Plato to that of the modern realist who condemns them as anti-rational and anti-scientific. Romance also has its defenders, for whom the claims of this ‘irresponsible’ and ‘escapist’ form are the claims of the creative imagination itself. ‘Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done…. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’, as Sidney wrote. Today, it is easy to point to the romances of previous ages, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Kubla Khan, which are now enshrined in the literary tradition. Yet these cases are a small minority. The vast majority of romances belong to paraliterature, and always have done.
