Romance is a long work of fiction that is less realistic than a novel. Most novelists try to present life realistically. Writers of romance concentrate on telling an entertaining story. Many use fantastic and supernatural plots and characters.
The meaning of the term romance has changed many times since the first romances appeared in Greece almost 2,000 years ago. In ancient Greek literature, most fiction dealt with either love or war. War stories were called epics, and love stories were called romances. The word romance is still used for a love story.
By about the 1200’s, most Western Europeans spoke a Romance language (language based on Latin), such as French, Italian, or Spanish. All fiction written in Romance languages was called romance. In most Romance languages today, the word for romance refers to long prose fiction. The word for novel means short prose fiction. English is the only language in which the words novel and romance distinguish between realistic and unrealistic fiction.
The first important romance was Daphnis and Chloe, (A.D. 100’s or 200’s) by a Greek named Longus. The greatest romances were written by medieval authors from the 1100’s to the 1400’s. Often written in verse, these romances mingle knightly combat, adventure, and courtship. Many describe the adventures of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Others tell about the ancient conqueror Alexander the Great; the Spanish hero The Cid; and the emperor Charlemagne and his devoted knight, Roland.
The romance flourished again during the late 1700’s and 1800’s. In England, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) began a trend for romances that emphasized mystery, terror, and the supernatural. These romances became known as Gothic novels. In the United States, the famous author Nathaniel Hawthorne insisted that he wrote romances, not novels. Elements of romance continue to appear in popular novels about courtship as well as in novels about the American frontier, in Western films, and in science fiction.
