A study of the development of the meaning of the word "romance" (romantic) as used in literary criticism

Abstract

The word "Romance" in English literature has stood, during the course of six centuries, for literary qualities and tendencies which, since the sixteenth century, have been the object of critical attack and defence. This study, after a preliminary investigation of the establishment of the word in our literature, and its acquirement of the meaning of fiction, has dealt with the word in connection with certain literary fashions and literary controversies by which its meaning seems to have been permanently modified. The stages in its history which have been selected are those in which it was affected by: 1. The Epic v. Romance controversy in Italy in the sixteenth century, in France and England in the seventeenth century.2. The rise and fall of the Heroic Romance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 3. The Gothic revival of the later half of the eighteenth century. 4. The critical theories concerning classic and romantic art which, originating in Germany at the close of the eighteenth, passed into England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 5. The critical appreciation of the English Romantic School in the nineteenth century.