Talk:Romantic fiction

I was under the impression that (at the bottom end of the market, at least) there were rather specific publishers' guidelines, similar to those in the porno novel industry; this event must occur by that page, etc. Does anyone have any cites, or can they show this to be untrue? -- Karada 17:03, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I used to have a copy of the Mills & Boon guidelines, but I don't remember it being that specific. US and UK publishers are probably different, in any case. Deb 17:14, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)

from romantic
use if good

Romance as a genre of literature is a complex term. Initially, the term applied only to the 'romans' (narratives) of Anglo-French literature. These were rooted in the story of the founding of Rome, which was itself rooted in the Homerica. Thus, stories of Aeneas, Brutus, and Romulus and Remus were "romance" subjects. The stories of King Arthur were included in this genre, since Arthur is supposed to either be derived from Rome or to have been one of the sackers of Rome. Therefore, "romance" poetry included all chivalric tales.

By the Renaissance, "romance" referred to any courtly tale, and especially narratives and prose. This designation survives in the French usage of "roman" to refer to the novel. By the 17th and 18th centuries, "romance" had come to mean any long narrative, whether it had courtly or erotic content or not. Thus, Fielding's famous description of his Joseph Andrews as "comic romance" or "a comic epic poem in prose" was a way not of indicating that his novel would have erotic love in it, but rather that it would be a narrative.

'Romantic fiction' and 'Romance novel' articles
I noticed that the 'Romance novel' article is marked as needing attention. There's clearly an overlap between that article and this. IMHO, this article should be about the general history of romantic fiction, and the 'Romance novel' should be about the books you find in the 'Romance' sections in bookshops today.

This would mean that most of the content in the 'Romantic novels' section in this article, and the entirety of the 'Romantic genres' section, should be moved to the 'Romance novel' section, and could serve as the foundation for an expanded article.

Any thoughts?

-- Katherine Shaw 15:17, Sep 8, 2004 (UTC)

What about the love poems?
OK, I've been looking all over Wikipedia for someplace where "romance poetry" in the modern sense is discussed, and have not found even the tiniest bit of information on it anywhere. Love poem redirects to poetry even though love poetry is mentioned nowhere on the page (except for one external link), Romantic poetry deals solely with the Romanticism sense of the term rather than the romantic love sense, and Romance novel only addresses the narrowest sense of the word: heterosexual, novel-length, happy-ending typical stories. I finally found a link to Romantic fiction in Talk:Romance novel, where Katherine Shaw said: "For other fiction that has romantic content - but that does not fit the strict criteria of current Romances, there's the Romantic fiction article." So I came here thinking I'd finally found the page so very well-hidden on Wikipedia that would have the information we so need to link to from St. Valentine's Day and Romantic love and Romantic poetry and Heart (symbol) and many other pages, but no - nothing but an empty disambiguation page! So. Where can we put information on stuff like Roses Are Red? -Silence 08:13, 15 September 2005 (UTC)