A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary

The term “romance”, has been traditionally looked on as a feminine genre. It has shifted from the courtly romance mode of the classical prose stories and medieval knightly tales, to the romantic novel which emerged in the early eighteenth century and has developed into what modern readers would recognise as romance literature today. The term originally meant literature written in a romance language, and yet, fairly early on, as discussed in the initial essays in this volume, Anglo‐Norman and medieval writers were aware enough of certain constructs and romance tropes to use them to create specific kinds of works, and,...