Romance (prose fiction)

Governments, for instance, tend to be uncompromisingly feudal-based, or evil empires or oligarchies, usually corrupt, while there was far more variety of rule in the actual Middle Ages.

[30] While fantasy is, generally speaking, not significant in the works of romance writers, Walter Scott's definition includes "marvellous and uncommon incidents".

with supposedly real people acting in a "natural" manner, Walpole created a new and distinct style of literary fiction, which has frequently been cited as a template for all subsequent gothic novels.

[37] Great Expectations contains elements of the Gothic genre, especially Miss Havisham, the bride frozen in time, and the ruined Satis House filled with weeds and spiders.

[38] Other characters linked to this genre include the aristocratic Bentley Drummle, because of his extreme cruelty; Pip himself, who spends his youth chasing a frozen beauty; the monstrous Orlick, who systematically attempts to murder his employers.

Then there is the fight to the death between Compeyson and Magwitch, and the fire that ends up killing Miss Havisham, scenes dominated by horror, suspense, and the sensational.

[40] With his Waverley novels Scott "hoped to do for the Scottish border" what Goethe and other German poets "had done for the Middle Ages, "and make its past live again in modern romance".

[42] By combining research with "marvelous and uncommon incidents", Scott attracted a far wider market than any historian could, and was the most famous novelist of his generation, throughout Europe.

[40] Scott influenced many nineteenth-century British novelists, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Kingsley, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and those who wrote for children, like Charlotte Yonge and G. A.

[44] His historical romances "influenced Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dumas, Pushkin, and many others; and his interpretation of history was seized on by Romantic nationalists, particularly in Eastern Europe".

[45] Auguste- Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret (1767–1843) "the principal French translator of the Waverley Novels, played a pivotal role in the diffusion of Scott's work throughout Europe".

In the twentieth century, examples are Joseph Conrad, John Cowper Powys, and more recently, J. R. R. Tolkien and A. S. Byatt, whose best-selling novel Possession: A Romance won the Booker Prize in 1990.

[59] Helen Small sees Wuthering Heights as being, both "one of the greatest love stories in the English language", while at the same time a "most brutal revenge narratives".

[60] Some critics suggest that reading Wuthering Heights as a love story not only "romanticizes abusive men and toxic relationships but goes against Brontë's clear intent".

[59] Moreover, while a "passionate, doomed, death-transcending relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw Linton forms the core of the novel",[59] Wuthering Heights consistently subverts the romantic narrative.

"[63] Many famous literary fiction romance novels, unlike most mass-market novels, end tragically, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, Atonement by Ian McEwan, and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

Because Heyer's romances are set more than 100 years earlier, she includes carefully researched historical detail to help her readers understand the period.

[74] Sensation fiction is commonly seen to have emerged as a definable genre in the wake of three novels: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60); Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood's East Lynne (1861); and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862).

Following a plot framework as old as Heliodorus, and so durable as to be still alive in Hollywood movies, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady.

In a six-year stretch from 1895 to 1901, he produced a stream of what he called "scientific romance" novels, which included The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon.In the United Kingdom, Wells's work was a key model for the British "scientific romance", and other writers in that mode, such as Olaf Stapledon,[84] J. D. Beresford,[85] S. Fowler Wright,[86] and Naomi Mitchison,[87] all drew on Wells's example.

"[90] He went on to cite The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, and The Country of the Blind as superior to anything else written by Wells's British contemporaries.

Though Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, Brian Aldiss has argued that it should be considered the first true science fiction story.

Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages is set during the end of Roman rule in Britain, with King Arthur, Myrddin (Merlin), Nineue (Lady of the Lake), and two survivors of an ancient race of giants.

Herman Melville described Moby-Dick (1851) as a romance in a letter of June 27 to his English publisher: My Dear Sir, — In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England.

The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.

[101]In the twentieth century Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations.

[103][104] Ludwig Tieck, Heinrich von Kleist, and E. T. A. Hoffmann "also profoundly influenced the development of European Gothic horror in the nineteenth century".

The bulk La Comédie Humaine, however, takes place during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, and Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature.

Jules Verne (1828–1905) was the author a series of bestselling novels that includes Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).

Georg Lukàcs, in The Historical Novel (1969) comments: Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) was a writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction.