Romance and tale
Quests, marvels and tales within tales.
35 works · Refine in the browser →
The romance is the story form between the epic and the novel: a hero on a journey, wonders along the way, and a shape given by the journey rather than by character. The Odyssey is the epic that is also a romance, and the Metamorphoses is a hundred tales in one. Chaucer’s Troilus is a courtly romance and the Canterbury Tales a frame for every kind. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the English medieval romance at its most perfect, and Malory the Arthurian cycle entire.
Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan is the philosophical romance, a boy raised alone who discovers everything, and Bacon’s New Atlantis and More’s Utopia are romances of the ideal society. Cervantes wrote the book that ended the chivalric romance by loving it too much, and the novel came out of the wreck. The Tempest is Shakespeare’s romance, a shipwreck and an island and a magician.
The Enlightenment used the form for arguments: Gulliver’s Travels, Candide and Rasselas are all romances in which a young man sees the world and learns something bitter. Defoe’s Crusoe is the romance becoming the novel on an island. The Thousand and One Nights, on the Harvard shelf, is the form’s largest example, tales inside tales for a thousand nights.
