Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel

Abstract

Modern Romance examines the relationship between the revival of romance form and the ascendancy of the novel in British literary culture, from 1760 to 1850. The revival of romance as the literary embodiment of a national cultural identity provided a metaphor for the 'authenticity' of the novel itself, set against the changing formations of modern life. The material conditions, cultural status and formal repertoire of prose fiction were given a canonical transformation, leading to the form's nineteenth-century heyday, in Scott's Waverley novels. Ian Duncan's illuminating and innovative study begins with the first identification of modern prose fiction with romance form in the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel, and moves through Scott's highly influential dialectical blend of romance and history, to his relations with his successor in the role of national author, Charles Dickens.

‘To Die as a Soldier’: The Vital Romance of the Military Novel

“…As Duncan has detailed, while traditional military codes of behaviour and emotion, what the novel describes as 'military honour', are paramount to the Jacobites, such honour appears only as an archaic and violent relic of former times that can no longer have a place in the progress of history. 25 Chastened by his experiences and naivety, Waverley abandons the Jacobites and sensibly returns home to England to marry Rose Bradwardine, his personal maturation and marriage standing as a homologue for a national history of progress from war and civil strife to Britain's settled modern condition of commerce and domestic harmony. 26 Yet while Waverley's abandonment of romance drives the novel's plot, romance nonetheless remains in the novel's closing chapter, where the scene of domestic harmony at Waverley's estate of Tully-Veolan is accompanied by a portrait of Waverley and Fergus in their Highland costume, the painting itself framed with the weapons Waverley had carried during the war.…”

“…25 Chastened by his experiences and naivety, Waverley abandons the Jacobites and sensibly returns home to England to marry Rose Bradwardine, his personal maturation and marriage standing as a homologue for a national history of progress from war and civil strife to Britain's settled modern condition of commerce and domestic harmony. 26 Yet while Waverley's abandonment of romance drives the novel's plot, romance nonetheless remains in the novel's closing chapter, where the scene of domestic harmony at Waverley's estate of Tully-Veolan is accompanied by a portrait of Waverley and Fergus in their Highland costume, the painting itself framed with the weapons Waverley had carried during the war. 27 The painting suggests that military honour glows forth as aesthetic romance at the very moment that it is historically superseded.…”

Roads as Regions, Networks and Flows: Waverley and the ‘Periphery’ of Romance

“…For Ian Duncan, this element of romance 'is the effect above all of plot', which delineates outcomes according to 'a shared cultural order distinct from material and historical contingency'. 52 A perfect example is the symbolic 'wedding' between Scotland and England at the end of the novel. Duncan argues: 'The final image of domestic and political reconciliation is the most fantastic, artful and labyrinthine of all evasions.'…”

“…76 Duncan argues: 'Romance is the essential principle of fiction: its difference from a record of "reality", of everyday life.' 77 In fact, by looking at movement in the novel and how roads are represented, it is clear that it is the way that romance and realism are connected, rather than separated, that shows the true progression of the novel. Austen and Scott are masters not of a new realism, or a new formulation of romance, but of a delineation of space that is able to hold romance and realism together on a border as thin as gossamer.…”

Domestic Gothic: Genre and Nation in Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House

“…Earlier in the 18th century, the sense of a break with the past would have been encouraged by the dominant political, cultural and social developments: Whig narratives that attempted to move on from the debates of the revolutions and emphasise stability; the ascendancy of (rather ahistorical) Augustan rationalism and classical aesthetics; and, importantly, the huge societal changes brought about by the rise of commercial capitalism. The interest in the Gothic can thus be figured as a result of an estrangement from one's own history, an attempt to reimagine or re‐establish connections with the national past; in particular, Gothic fiction's fascination with disrupted lines of descent has been read as dramatising the break with and search for that past (Duncan 22–23). Thus, despite Walpole's claim that Otranto was about “anything, rather than politics” (Walpole, in a letter to William Cole, 9 March 1765, Letters 328), the very escapism and eccentricity of his text takes on political significance as it uncovers a rupture with the past and problematises a discourse of political closure .…”