Download The characteristics of Romance

Guidance for students:
You may find help for your answer in Chapter 6 of your course book, Romantic Writings, and in the
audiocassette on Romantic Poets.
You may
1- Begin by discussing the characteristics of Romance.
2- In what way did the conventions of Medieval Romance change in the Romantic period?
3- What does ironical treatment of romance mean?
4- Give a general meaning of the term "femme fatale,"
5- Discuss what the femmes fatales represent in the legends or stories in these poems.
6- In what way are they negative forces and what do they destroy?
7- Please substantiate your answer with apt examples and quotations from the poems.
The characteristics of Romance
Characteristics of Medieval Romance
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Setting, characters, and adventures drawn from the knightly class
Elements of the marvelous; miracles
Hero is characterized by the qualities of "Mars and Venus"
1. courage
2. skill in arms
3. openness to adventure and challenge
4. love for his lady
Heroine is characterized by the qualities of "Venus and the Virgin Mary"
1. chastity
2. blond hair, pink-and-white complexion (almost as fair as the Virgin Mary!)
3. Relationships:
 obedience to father, particularly in marriage
 (women who disobey father in choosing a husband are punished)
 meek, mild, devotion to husband
 willing to endure pain and attacks on her honor for husband's sake
 never represented as a mother
Characteristics of Romance
The term romans originally indicated that a classical story was translated out of Latin into the
vernacular. More generally speaking, Medieval romances, which were written in verse(usually
octosyllabic couplets), might meet some or all of the criteria below but generally comprise
enough of these characteristics to make them recognizable as romances.
Romance usually features
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private issues rather than the public affairs of nations and societies;
a close relationship or love affair, often disrupted in some way;
a hero who acts as an individual, not as a representative of a society or group, usually a
knight or nobleman (especially in later chivalric romance);
a lady who somehow figures in the hero's actions;
an adventure, quest or search upon which the hero sets out;
an emphasis on noble action and deeds (especially in later chivalric romance);
action set in an exotic or fantastic place distinct from the everyday world;
a courtly milieu, the world of the noble audience depicted in the story
other fantastic or magical elements;
plots governed by chance, not by a rational course of events; and many have
a happy ending.
Characteristics of the Medieval Romance
A tale of High Adventure. Can be a religious crusade, a conquest for the knight's leige
lord, or the rescue of a captive lady or any combination.
Characterized by:
1. Medieval romance usually idealizes chivalry
2. Medieval romance Idealizes the hero-knight and his noble deeds
3. An important element of the medieval romance is the knight's love for his lady.
4. The settings of medieval romance tend to be imaginary and vague.
5. Medieval romance derives mystery and suspense from supernatural elements.
6. Medieval romance uses concealed or disguised identity.
7. Repetition of the mystical number "3." (Repetitions of the number or multiples of 3)
----Characteristics of the Hero-Knight
1. Birth of a great hero is shrouded in mystery
2. He is reared away from his true home in ignorance of his real parents.
3. For a time his true identity is unknown
4. After meeting an extraordinary challenge, he claims his right
5. His triumph benefits his nation or group.
Medieval Romance and changes in the Romantic period
Romanticism
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"Romantics" redirects here. For the band, see The Romantics.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 38.58 × 29.13 inches, 1818, Oil on canvas
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half
of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution.[1] It was
partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction
against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music,
and literature.
The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such
emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity in untamed nature
and its qualities that are "picturesque", both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom, as
well as arguing for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of
language, custom and usage.
Romanticism is closely tied to the idea of the "Romantic." Note the capital 'R' differs from "romantic"
meaning "someone involved in romance," although the words have the same root. The word romance
comes from the Old French romanz, which is a genre of prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in
medieval literature. Just as we speak of Romance languages, romanz was written in the vernacular and not
in Latin. Our modern sense of a romantic character is sometimes based on Byronic or Romantic ideals.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements
of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of
population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar
and distant in modes more authentic than chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision
and to escape.
The ideologies and events of the French Revolution, rooted in Romanticism[citation needed], affected the
direction it was to take, and the confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on
Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the
nineteenth century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated
the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society.
It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from
classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a
Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
ironical treatment of romance
Until Romanticism, the literary or rhetorical function of irony was seen as a special case within an
otherwise simple and literal language of representation. Irony was deemed to be an ornament or trope
within representational language. For the Romantics, however, it was only possible to have a seemingly
simple and representational world through the forgetting and repression of the creativity and poetry of
language. Irony – or the gap between words and world – was, for the Romantics, original. Speech and
language originate or come into being only when ideas or concepts give form and imagination to the
actual world; all language is essentially and originally figural, or different from the world it supposedly
names. Literal language is the denial or forgetting of this gap. If we think of our language as a simple oneto-one label or picture of the world, then we forget the creative and disruptive birth of language. To see all
language as ironic, the Romantics argued, would be to restore life to its once open, fluid and productive
past. Life would no longer be frozen into the fixed forms of grammar and syntax, or reduced to what is
sayable. Irony recognises a sense that is always other than what is said.
Once Romanticism established that the truth of life did not lie in adequate representation but in a
questioning and imaginative play of representations – such as poetry – then it became possible to see
literature as the privileged mode of human understanding. Literature would be the truth of life because
literature was essentially ironic: adopting a permanently distanced and questioning attitude to all language
and fixed positions.
Irony
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or discordance between what a
speaker or a writer says; and what he or she means, or is generally understood.
In modern usage it can also refer to particularly striking examples of incongruities observed in everyday
life between what was intended or said and what actually happened.
There is some argument about what is or is not ironic, but all the different senses of irony revolve around
the perceived notion of an incongruity between what is said and what is meant; or between an
understanding of reality, or an expectation of a reality, and what actually happens.
Irony can be funny, but it does not have to be.
The term Socratic irony, which was coined by Aristotle, refers to the Socratic Method. It is not irony in
the modern sense of the word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
meaning of the term "femme fatale,"
A woman with an irresistible seductive charm, who leads those who love her into danger or despair
Etymology:
French, literally, disastrous woman
Date:
1912
1 : a seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations 2 : a woman
who attracts men by an aura of charm and mystery
femme fatale (plural: femmes fatales) is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her
lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly
situations. She is an archetypal character of literature and art.
The phrase is French for "fatal (or "deadly") woman." A femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose
by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, and sexual allure. Typically, she is exceptionally wellendowed with these qualities. In some situations, she uses lying or coercion rather than charm. She may
also be (or imply to be) a victim, caught in a situation from which she cannot escape; The Lady from
Shanghai (a 1948 film noir) giving one such example. Her characteristic weapon, if needed, is frequently
poison, which also serves as a metaphor for her charms.
Her ability to entrance and hypnotize her male victim was in the earliest stories seen as being literally
supernatural, hence the most prosaic femme fatale today is still described as having a power akin to an
enchantress, vampire, female monster or demon. The ideas involved are closely tied to fears of the female
witch.
Although typically villainous, femmes fatales have also appeared as antiheroines in some stories, and
some even repent and become heroines by the end of the tale (see, for example, Bell, Book and Candle).
In social life, the femme fatale tortures her lover in an asymmetrical relationship, denying confirmation of
her affection. She usually drives him to the point of obsession and exhaustion so that he is incapable of
making rational decisions.