romance

romance [O.Fr.,=something written in the popular language, i.e., a Romance language]. The roman of the Middle Ages was a form of chivalric and romantic literature widely diffused throughout Europe from the 11th cent. With the Provençal troubadours the roman was a form of narrative, originally sung but later recited before courts. The trouvères lengthened these into the chansons de geste and the romans d'aventures, or romances of love and adventure. It is from the latter class that the modern romance descends (see novel).

Bibliography

See studies by A. B. Taylor (1930, repr. 1969), G. Beer (1970), and E. Vinaver (1971).

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romance

Literary form that developed in the aristocratic courts of mid-12th-century France and had its heyday in France and Germany between the mid-12th and mid-13th century in the works of such masters as Chrétien de Troyes and Gottfried von Strassburg. The staple subject matter is chivalric adventure (see chivalry), though love stories and religious allegories are sometimes interwoven. Most romances draw their plots from classical history and legend, Arthurian legend, and the adventures of Charlemagne and his knights. Written in the vernacular, they share a taste for the exotic, the remote, and the miraculous. Lingering echoes of the form can be found in later centuries, as in the Romanticism of the 18th–19th century and today's popular romantic novels.

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romance

1. a narrative in verse or prose, written in a vernacular language in the Middle Ages, dealing with strange and exciting adventures of chivalrous heroes

2. any similar narrative work dealing with events and characters remote from ordinary life

3. the literary genre represented by works of these kinds

4. (in Spanish literature) a short narrative poem, usually an epic or historical ballad

5. a lyrical song or short instrumental composition having a simple melody