Last Week, I attended GRF Sara’s Rose Cafe about romance in the traditional sense. Although many of us today would associate “romance” with a certain genre of novels and with love and romantic relationships, the word also has another meaning that refers to a genre of historical literature dealing with fantasy and adventures and idealized heroes. Thus, we have Arthurian romances chronicling the adventures of King Arthur and his knights. Epic fantasy novels or series such as J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings would also be considered romance. GRF Sara’s research studies the rise and fall of the popularity of romance during the English Renaissance period, but – knowing that this topic might be foreign to most of us – she linked the ideas of romance, magic, and alternate realities that cropped up during this historical time period to modern day issues.

One subject that we touched on near the end especially piqued my interest. We discussed our interests in the fantasy genre and whether romance is still thriving through these stories. Many people in the group mentioned that they had read fantasy books as children but no longer did, leading me to wonder about the inherent idealism present in many fantasy stories and whether that contributes to our nostalgia surrounding them. The main conceit of romance, with chivalrous heroes and epic adventures, lends itself to stories with very clear-cut morality systems and conflicts between good and evil. Nevertheless, as a current avid reader of fantasy literature, I know that many novels in the genre subvert these expectations, and I wonder about how historical authors of romances tackled these ideas.