Romance Literature

Although no longer a household name, Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984) was once a best-selling novelist, the author of an epic historical novel that became a Hollywood blockbuster – Green Dolphin Street – based on experiences of some of her own ancestors in the Nineteenth century. She created a masterpiece of children’s literature, The Little White Horse. Her career spanned from 1934 to 1970. But now, more than fifty years later, Goudge is remembered by a small group of enthusiasts, and occasionally rediscovered by adventurous readers. This article focuses on Goudge’s war-time novel, The Castle on the Hill (1942), considering the special attributes that reveal the quality of Goudge’s writing, as well as her major achievement as a philosophical-religious author. Something of Goudge herself will also be made clear.

Arthur Conan Doyle's 'A Study in Scarlet' (1887), which introduces Sherlock Holmes, is a famously disjointed narrative, yet provides a compelling detective story. One strategy employed to create a sense of cohesion is to adapt structures and themes from romance and, in particular, from myth. Conan Doyle's work here appears to prefigure characteristics of high modernist texts.

L’identificazione del livello di diritto amministrato presso la corte di Amore, chiaramente presentato come tale in un passo nodale di Cligés e nel monologo tematico del Chevalier de la Charrette, consente di venire a capo del senso generale dell’opera di Chrétien d eTroyes, chiarendo tutta una serie di contraddizioni solo apparenti. In particolare emerge con chiarezza la ragione per la quale il cavaliere innamorato debba adottare comportamenti che derogano o spesso entrano direttamente in conflitto rispetto alle leggi vigenti, indipendentemente dal fatto che esse siano amministrate sulla base di norme del diritto feudale o di quello consuetudinario.

In this paper I argue that the radical textual practice in Barbara Baynton"s (1857-1929) novel, Human Toll (1907, foreshadows contemporary feminine appropriation and subversion of the Bildungsroman genre which testifies to traumatic experience; specifically the creative emergence from the traumatic inheritance of feminine embodiment, demonstrated by concern with feminine subjectivity and signified by the colonised female (body). What Baynton argues for in Human Toll is an autonomous place for feminine expression, for écriture feminine, in the symbolic world. In a perturbation of genres, Baynton combines melodrama-the genre par excellence in which women have agency by default; romance; and the Bildungsroman, to create an impression of how fraught access to creative agency is for women in the context of trauma, and the cultural constraints on women at the cusp of Federation in the Australian Bush. As her heroine emerges from the feminine traumatic paradigm, her encounters with many aspects of the phallocentric world provoke traumatic repetition. For Baynton no masculine edifice is sacrosanct: Catholicism, property law, marriage, sex, education, wealth, and class are all found to be wanting in relation to the feminine. Experiences of opposition and denial serve to spur the protagonist into a fervent conviction of her desire for agency, and to find creative and cathartic expression in writing. In doing so, as Suzette Henke contends, the female author initiates an enabling discourse of testimony and self-revelation. In audaciously reinscribing the claims of feminine desire into the texts of a traditionally patriarchal culture, this écriture feminine attempts to reframe embodied experience through experimentation of assumptions around signifying practices, interrogating the outcome for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity.

María Rosa Menocal argued for the hybrid origins and development of medieval Romance literature. She explored the cultural and social context of this hybridity as well as the reasons for its occlusion in modern scholarship. While her most popular work explored the “culture of tolerance” of medieval Iberia, I argue that her main contribution lay in her appreciation of the medieval love lyric (as well as other similar cultural artifacts), the exploration of their hybrid or “mongrel” origins, and their enduring importance and impact in the present. Menocal’s style has a lyricism of its own, indivisible from its subject, which serves as a critique of the objectivist scholarship responsible for the occlusion of the lyric’s origins and as an argument for a continuity of practice between the lyric and its appreciation.

Riassunto Il ciclo dei trentasei Contorni danteschi del pittore e disegnatore berlinese Giovanni Bona-ventura Genelli (1798-1868) rappresenta un interessante tentativo d'interpretare il testo della Commedia alla luce dei principi del classicismo tedesco, sull'esempio di Carstens e di Koch e, in parte di Flaxman da cui però Genelli si distingue per continua ricerca volta ad esprimere la plasticità delle forme. Caratteristica precipua delle sue illustrazioni è inoltre il ricorso continuo sia alla scultura antica che agli affreschi michelangioleschi della Sistina come repertorio iconografico. L'articolo approfondisce questi aspetti con particolare riferimento alle sedici tavole dedicate all'Inferno. Abstract The cycle of the 36 Outline illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy represents a very interesting attempt towards a pictorial interpretation of the text inspired to the principles of the German classicism. Genelli is in this respect a follower of Carstens and Koch. The cleanliness of his line drawing with no shading and few background details is reminiscent of Flaxman; nonetheless, an evident mark of Genelli's style is his permanent effort of exploring and expressing the dynamic plasticity of bodies. To represent Dante's world he also draws on ancient sculpture as well as on Michelangelo's Sistina frescoes as an ico-nographic repertoire. These aspects are here illustrated with special regard to the sixteen illustration of the Inferno.

This article reads Emma Donoghue's 2007 novel Landing as an intersectional romance. The novel's conflict emerges not only from the distance between the two lovers, the Irish flight attendant Síle and the Canadian curator Jude, but from several intersecting differences: gender identity, class, race, age, sexual orientation, and nationality. Specifically, this article lays out how Síle’s nationality and sexuality are compromised through invisibility, and unpacks how her race and gender contribute to this invisibility. While Jude is recognizably queer and Canadian, as a femme of colour Síle’s identity requires more explanation and affirmation. Through Landing, Emma Donoghue examines how Síle can find happiness without compromising her identity as an Irish racialized femme.