Talk:Historical romance

Untitled
This article needs work. The organization is terrible and the focus on romance novels is misleading. There is a large scale conflation here between romance as a mode of writing (like the novel, but deemed less realistic) and romance as a popular genre. History and development of historical romance should focus on nineteenth century novels that take as their model Sir Walter Scott, not on the popular genre as it in turn arises from this shared heritage. I would not signal this for deletion, but I would suggest restarting the article as a stub. As it is written right now, it should be a subheading under Romance Novels. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.62.235.78 (talk) 20:37, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
 * This is a spinoff from romance novel. It's focus is, appropriately on the modern romance novel.  I will add a hatnote though, to redirect to romanticism. Karanacs (talk) 00:30, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Heyer and An Infamous Army
I removed this text from the article "One notable exception, An Infamous Army was set before and during the Battle of Waterloo" (An Infamous Army, Heyer, Georgette (ISBN 978-0099465768) . Details of Heyer's individual books are not relevant to this article. (They are in her article.) The paragraph on Heyer is meant only to introduce the first historical romances and to give a very general description of what made them historical romances (using plot device as a setting, etc).  Not all of Heyer's books were romances; she also wrote thrillers and historical novels. Not all of her romances followed exactly the same pattern and shared the same characteristics, and that is okay.  This paragraph is not claiming that all of Heyer's books followed the generalizations we list, but instead showing that many of her books were like this, and were then historical romances.  Does that make sense? Please discuss here before reinserting that information. Karanacs (talk) 15:13, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

History
The history section is woefully Anglophone-centric. Modern historical romance novels were around way before the early 70s--the hugely popular French Angelique comes to mind. The first book was published in the Fifties and translated into English soon after. They were made into a series of wildly popular movies in the Sixties, too. I suggest including this series as it's definitely a landmark one in the history of historical romance.

Inclusion/Exclusion of Gone With the Wind
I reverted the inclusion of the cover of Gone With the Wind (GWTW) as a classic Civil War romance and instead of getting into an edit war, I'm moving the discussion here. GWTW is a love story, yes, but not an example of a historical romance as set out by Romance Writer's of America (RWA) as it does not have a Happy Ending (HEA=Happily Ever After) or a HFN (Happy For Now). It's the same reason Nicholas Sparks's novels are not romances. This is an important distinction, and one often misunderstood by the general public, so it would be good, in my opinion, if Wikipedia helped to elucidate this difference and not compound the misunderstanding. plange (talk) 10:55, 22 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Perhaps it would be helpful to mention those standards (and who sets them) in the article -- more helpful than a meticulous list of observations that "jimjam romances are set in the jimjam period."

Changing the title to: Historical romance (prose fiction)
The article focusses solely on prose fiction, so it seems logical to change it to the above. Films, theatre, etc. can be dealt with in parallel articles. Are there any objections? Rwood128 (talk) 15:03, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Definition
There appears to be an alternate definition for historical fiction and I have initiated a discussion on the Talk page of Historical fiction:.

Some critics consider Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter to be an historical novel, even though it was published in 1803 and deals with events in the 1790s. Rwood128 (talk) 13:58, 23 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I find it hard to see Wolf Hall as "historical romance"--do the sources actually call it that? Contrary to what this article wants to say, in contemporary English usage, "historical romance" is not synonymous with "historical fiction." Walter Scott is definitely "historical romance," but Mantel's approach to the historical setting is the opposite of "romantic" or "Romantic" (in its various literary senses). Cynwolfe (talk) 18:38, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

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What happened to this page ?
This article is incomprehensible. It mixes historical novel and historical romance. A part is a duplicate of Historical fiction.--Guil2027 (talk) 21:11, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Romance (literary fiction)
I have created a new article Romance (literary fiction) to cover all romances that have literary merit, including historical romances. The question now arises: should the historical romance article be merged into this new article, or is it better to keep them separate? Rwood128 (talk) 16:54, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This article is only about historical romance novels. Historical romance ≠ historical novel. --Guil2027 (talk) 13:44, 5 April 2022 (UTC)