ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book examines Romance as an example of what Robert Miles calls, 'anti-philosophical romance', that is to say romance that confirms the social norms which it reflects, and that fails in the end to expose the ideologies which underpin such norms. Thomas Moser's influential model of achievement and decline, for instance, conflates what he perceives as the increased presence of amorously active women in the later fiction with the presence of romance narrative itself. In both An Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye sets out to identify and categorize the elements of romance that, once thus enumerated, can be traced backwards and forward through Indo-European literature at will. Joseph Conrad claimed that The Rescue would stand as 'the swan song of romance', as if both he and the genre might say no more.
