Over the centuries, romance has prospered as a versatile, enjoyable genre. From Shakespearean tragedies to modern rom-coms, romance is diverse, popular, and constantly infiltrating other media like action movies, fantasy novels, medical dramas, and various other genres.
To explore romance throughout significant literary events, let’s begin with Homer’s eight century epic, The Odyssey. Centred around its protagonist Odysseus travelling for 10 years to return to his wife, Penelope, the poem displays his romantic devotion. Although Homer’s other famous epic, The Iliad, is not a romance, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles is a stunning romantic retelling.
700 years later, Shakespeare wrote some of the Western world’s formative literature. The forbidden romance in Romeo and Juliet and comedies (ending in conclusive, satisfactory marriages) like Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing have influenced centuries of writing. His impact is evident in modern film adaptations like She’s the Man, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare and Petrarch’s love poems are wildly influential. The structure of their sonnets and blazons—a poem admiring a lover’s physical attributes—have inspired many a poet and featured in countless anthologies (including the Norton Anthology used at The University of Edinburgh!) Interestingly, Shakespeare’s sonnets, such as ‘Sonnet 108’ addressed to a “sweet boy,” have been interpreted as evidence of his bisexuality.
Three centuries later, a variety of romances were born from the Victorian period—despite society’s repression. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre explores romance between the eponymous Jane and Byronic Mr. Rochester within a Gothic setting. Perhaps even more famously, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is revered for its romance between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women similarly explores romance and quotidian life in tandem. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray certainly also has romantic tones, solidified by its censorship, republishing, and evidence in Wilde’s arrest for sodomy/homosexuality.
On the topic of Byronic, the Romantics—Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats—formed their literary movement to appreciate nature, culture, and individuality. Romance takes on another meaning within these poets’ works, although love is still explored—in Keats’ To a Lady Seen for a few moments at Vauxhall or Edgar Allen Poe’s elegiac Annabel Lee. The romanticisation (or sexualisation) of nature also features, such as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Byron’s Childe’s Harold Pilgrimage. Notable female poets of the era include Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who I would highly recommend for her political poems) and Emily Dickinson.
Twentieth century Modernism featured less romance: iconic literature of that time includes the political, harrowing The Grapes of Wrath, the ultimately tragic The Great Gatsby, Orwell’s various political novels, and poetry like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and war poets like Wilfred Owen. As the century was rife with conflict and tension, much of the literature from the period was not romantic, although it did persist as in Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Margaret Mitchell’s iconic Gone With the Wind. For those who perceived Nick and Gatsby’s romantic tension in The Great Gatsby, Anna-Marie McLemore’s queer, romantic retelling Self-Made Boys doesn’t ‘Bury Your Gays’ (the tradition of killing off queer characters.)Romance is currently very popular thanks to Booktok, Goodreads, and other platforms. Although there’s been a rise in over-produced, cliche romances, there are plenty of decent novels. For enjoyers of fantasy or adventure with a romance subplot, I recommend Anna-Marie McLemore’s When the Moon Was Ours; Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels; Samantha Shannon; VE Schwab; and Cassandra Clare.
Photo by Joel Timothy on Unsplash