Chapter 2. ‘‘A Magnificent Fragment’’: Dialects of Time and the American Historical Romance

2010 ◽  
pp. 63-124
Keyword(s):  
Historical Romance

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

Shakespeare’s Portrayal of a Tyrant

Moreana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (Number 193- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 40-53
Author(s):  
Peter Milward
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sir Walter Raleigh ◽  
The Ideal

The theme of tyranny, so central (as we have seen in two recent issues of Moreana) to the writings and the experience of Thomas More, is hardly less central to the plays and the memory of William Shakespeare. This centrality appears not so much in the plays of his Elizabethan period as in those of the subsequent Jacobean period, especially in the final romances by way of warming up to his presentation of the historical romance of Henry VIII. There, however, the tyranny of the king, though notably emphasized by Sir Walter Raleigh in his contemporaneous History of the World, is strangely muted, as also is his un-Shakespearian character, but it comes out strongly in the two preceding romances of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, once we read them, as they require us to read them, as “topical allegories”. Then, to the characters of the jealous Leontes and the wrathful Cymbeline, we may add the threatening personality of Antiochus at the beginning of Pericles, as yet another figure (based on a widespread rumour) of the quintessential tyranny of Henry VIII. At the same time, this figure of the victimizer calls to be qualified by the complementary figure of the victim, the heroine in these romances, not only Hermione and Perdita, Thaisa and Marina, and Imogen, but even or especially in Desdemona as victimized by her jealous husband Othello. Then, in the above mentioned “topical allegory” of these Jacobean plays, she stands as well for the ideal of the Virgin Mary as for the memory of Catholic England at the heart of the dramatist.

XX.—Wilhelm Hauff's Specific Relation to Walter Scott

PMLA ◽  
1911 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-592
Author(s):  
Garrett W. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Specific Relation ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Walter Scott

In 1899 Dr. C. W. Eastman read a paper before the Modern Language Association, in which he maintained that of all Scott's novels Ivanhoe served Hauff most completely as the source of his historical romance, Lichtenstein. In 1903 this claim was disputed by Dr. W. H. Carruth, who thro the same channel advanced his reasons for believing that Waverley and not Ivanhoe was the model in question. A year later Max Schuster in a monograph discussed Hauff's relation to his historical sources; and almost simultaneously the whole problem of his historical and literary dependence was treated by Max Drescher. Incisive and scholarly as these inquiries are, it has seemed to us in the light of our own studies that one phase of the matter still offered opportunity for further investigation. The evidence of Hauff's attitude toward Walter Scott is by no means meagre or indirect; and we have never been able to persuade ourselves that this specific relation has been adequately determined. In any case it is insufficient merely to ask whether Waverley or Ivanhoe was the prototype, or, as Drescher did, arbitrarily to choose only six of Scott's novels for comparison. The situation demanded rather a most careful study of all the works to which Hauff had access, and an equally careful analysis of the evidence thus obtained.

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