Romance

Marsha S. Collins

pp. 263-291

in: Barry Stocker, Michael Mack (eds), The Palgrave handbook of philosophy and literature, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

This chapter synthesizes the varied debates and paradoxes, literary and philosophical, identified with the enduring and capacious genre of romance from classical antiquity to the present day, such as the status of ancient Greek romances as genre paradigms and the relationship between romance and the novel. Major critical contributions to the shifting perceptions of romance are examined, as are examples of romance as a special form of idealizing fictional world, a created universe with long-established conventions that invite creative invention and experimentation and lend themselves to philosophical and ideological expression, as exemplified by works that range from Heliodorus' Ethiopica to James Cameron's Avatar. Recent cognitive approaches to art suggest that romance may be the art form closest to the anatomy of the human imagination.