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8 Romance In the previous chapter, we explored some of the ways that gender politics informs Hollywood movies, attending to ‘chick flicks’ and romance films in particular. We argued that practices of exclusion and invisibility are produced by male domination, male-centredness, and male identification, and that these have politically salient effects. Women and girls are represented as caring about and taking pleasure in (almost exclusively heterosexual) romantic relationships, investing in the fairytale happy ending typified by the wedding, and by implication
Writing about romance in the Canterbury Tales , J.A. Burrow comments, ‘It is as if Chaucer, who seems so much at home in the fabliau, the miracle of the Virgin, and the saint’s life, felt less easy with the very genre which we regard as most characteristic of his period, the knightly romance’. He goes further in a comparison with Dante: ‘it may be surmised that he, like Chaucer, regarded knightly romance as a form of agreeable light reading to which no serious fourteenth-century poet should devote more than
Metaphorically set in a border town, the darkly lit, libidinous urban topography of Orson Welles’ classic late film noir, Touch of Evil (1958), harbours primal fears and partially clads criminal activities, underscoring the fact that in the 1950s miscegenation was still illegal in a number of US states. This article juxtaposes Charlton Heston‘s leading role in two interracial romances, Touch of Evil and Diamond Head (1963), which takes place in the new border state of Hawaii. The historical foregrounding of the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and ‘60s with respect to the interracial romances growing popularity is discussed, and the relevance of recent genetic research into the appeal of difference and the way it functions within a ‘primal drama’.
Relatively late manifestations of the European philhellene revival of Greco-Roman letters presented to readers complex, extended prose fiction in which the trials of love mask an implicit moral and political allegory. Inevitably, coming during the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, this cultural phenomenon was not without its religious and political dimensions. Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus were the three principal English exponents of rhetorically conscious Greco-Roman erotic romance. This book enhances the understanding of the erotic romances of Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth by setting them within an integrated political, rhetorical, and aesthetic context. It investigates how Renaissance translators alter rhetorical styles, and even contents, to accord with contemporary taste, political agendas and the restrictions of censorship. Particular attention is paid to differences between the French courtly style of Jacques Amyot and François de Belleforest and the more literal translations of their English counterparts. Valuable perspective on the early translations is offered through the modern English versions in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels. The book considers the three texts of Sidney's Arcadia, as a political romance sharing many of the thematic and rhetorical concerns of the ancients. It focuses on a narrow range of Shakespeare's plays including Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The book identifies Mary Sidney Wroth's masque-like prose allegory, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, as philhellene Protestant political propaganda.
5 The empire of romance: love in a postcolonial climate Deborah Philips The rose of romance, the internationally recognised logo of the Mills & Boon publishing house, might appear to be a very English rose, but its sales are global and its readership multinational. In 1999, the official historian of the company could write: ‘Ninety years after its founding, Mills & Boon is one of only two British publishers to have become a household name in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth … [it is] a worldwide publishing empire.’1 In 2008, it was estimated that Mills
10 Romancing the East: Greeks and Saracens in Guy of Warwick Rebecca Wilcox Guy’s ties to the East For decades, literary critics such as Frederic Jameson and Stephen Knight have argued that medieval romance, for the most part, unquestioningly reflects dominant ideologies of the ruling elite.1 Far from conforming to this prescription, however, the fourteenth-century popular romance Guy of Warwick engages contemporary socio-political concerns in critical and transformative ways. Guy’s fantastic reworking of England’s past through its titular hero both recognises
3 A family romance Introduction Before he turned 18, Fanon had joined the dissidence in Dominica and then the 5th Battalion which set off to North Africa. He enlisted to defend mother France and her republican institutions from the threat of Nazism, but his encounter with colonial racism in North Africa and mainland France shattered his idealism. As I noted in the Introduction, he wrote to his parents in April to express his disillusionment with the war and the causes he was fighting for. In ‘family romance’, argues Freud, children reject their parents because
elsewhere in the country declaring their excitement at now being able to marry or have sex with Kashmiri women. As many pointed out, there has never been any restriction against marriage with Kashmiris. What this slippage reveals however is the centrality of ideas about romance and love, as well as the reproductive female body, to debates on territory and the (Hindu) nation in India. As feminist geographer Sara Smith ( 2012: 1513 ) writes in the context of contested Muslim–Buddhist marriages in Ladakh, gendered bodies and their reproductive potentials
72 4 Romancing the Eucharist: confessional conflict and Elizabethan romances Christina Wald In one of the most erotically charged scenes of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a young princess called Philoclea finds herself in a perplexing situation. When she talks to her dear friend, the Amazon Cleophila, in a lonely pastoral setting, she is unexpectedly invited to witness ‘a miserable miracle of affection’: Cleophila asks Philoclea to ‘[b]ehold here before your eyes Pyrocles, prince of Macedon’.1 Alas, the only person whom Philoclea can discern is Cleophila; the
This volume brings together three little-known works by key playwrights from the
late sixteenth-century golden age of English drama. All three convey the public
theatre’s fascination with travel and adventure through the popular genre of
heroic romance, while reflecting the contemporaries’ wide range of responses to
cross-cultural contacts with the Muslim East and the Mediterranean challenges
posed by the Ottoman empire.
The volume presents the first modern-spelling
editions of the three plays, with extensive annotations catering for specialised
scholars while also making the texts accessible to students and theatregoers. A
detailed introduction discusses issues of authorship, dates and sources, and
sets the plays in their historical and cultural contexts, offering exciting
insights on Elizabethan performance strategies, printing practices, and the
circulation of knowledge and stereotypes related to ethnic and religious
difference.