Romance and Romantic: a Revaluation of Deprecated Terms

Abstract

This study seeks to underscore the prominent role played by the medieval romances and the nineteenthcentury romantics in English literature despite the fact that the words ‘romance’ and ‘romantic’ are both – and to the present day – belittled as pertaining to the derogatory sense of ‘unreality’. In revaluation, this paper highlights that the verse narratives spread by the troubadours throughout Western Europe were behind the birth of the Romance Spanish, French, Italian and other languages derived from Latin. As well, those romances, which countered the epic, have established the present genre of the novel – called ‘roman’ in all European languages except English. More significantly, the knights of the Middle Ages, immortalized by the romance, were the first in European history to value woman as a partner in love for the sake of whom a knight undertook his quest. On the other hand, Romanticism, which emerged in Germany on the philosophical tenets of Immanuel Kant and Jean Jacque Rousseau, came to dominate the literary scene during the 19th century and challenge thefirmlyestablished rationality of the Enlightenment era. In England, the poetsBlake, Byron, Shelley, and others introduced the voice of the individual who rebels against the confines upon the freedom of the human soul. Both the romance and the romantic tendency suffered fierce attacks starting from the monarchy of the 14th century to the conservatives of the Victorian period. Even the Modernists of the 20th century maintained a deprecating view of romanticism and described it as a period of chaos.