ABSTRACT
The romance has always flourished in periods of rapid change: twelfth-century France, Elizabethan England, the end of the eighteenth century. Although what Yeats called 'the gentleness of old romance' has changed into the insipidity of women's magazine fiction, other romance elements survive in new guises. The 'ideal worlds' of works such as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings cycle emphasize the grotesque and the menacing. They express the conserving and crystallizing function of romance. The element of sense-dislocation emphasizes the grotesque. It releases us from the ordinary conditions of life. Romance, being absorbed with the ideal, always has an element of prophecy. It remakes the world in the image of desire. At present, however, such prophetic literature tends to resolve into images of dread. The function of romance in our own time may well prove to have been not wish-fulfilment but exorcism.
