Romance

No, not like that.

It's another week and another lecture topic, this time on the romantic literary genre. It stems, as with most things, from Latin and from the Romanic languages that followed (primarily French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian). In these languages vernacular tales of heroic deeds became popular, with the most renowned early example being the chansons de geste that focused on the adventures of French knights. Such storytelling forms became more apparent in other parts of Europe too and soon turned up in English and German. They took the form of chivalric verse or prose, or of a fictitious prose narrative driven by myth, and were characterised by extravagance, idealism and the hopeful love of the protagonist.

Apparently there are six key points to romantic literature:

1. The tale centres on a youthful, often virginal, hero undertaking a rite of passage that usually ends in a form of sexual fulfillment. The hero will often require assistance or companionship, giving an aspect of homosocial attachment to the heterosexual desires that drive the tale forwards. Unfortunately, the tale doesn't drive particularly fast in a lot of cases and the plot tends to be padded with unnecessary tasks.
2. The tale sticks to the cyclical pattern of exile and return, where the self-alienation of the hero allows for transformation and empowering before going home. Joseph Campbell dubbed this structure as Separation, Initiation, Return. He also called it Star Wars.
   
3. The tale sticks to the broad chivalric code of righting wrongs and helping others, which can serve to justify the hero's often self-serving interests by increasing the altruistic aspect of the journey.
4. The tale is usually made easier to digest by being placed in a remote geographic and/or historic setting. This eventually built up to the modern fantasy genre ("A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...").
5. The tale will often focus on a hero who is chosen by a higher power and subsequently granted supernatural or superlative abilities to make the adventures that much more memorable.
6. The tale will almost always be broken down into simplistic notions of right and wrong, good and evil, with no shades of grey to complicate matters.

That's pretty much that as far as the introduction went. Most of the medieval romancers also stuck to one of the three main Matters - the Arthurian, the Carlovingian or the Alexandrian. Obviously, this meant that there were many different versions of the same characters to be found although they were somehow still recognisable as intertextual icons (in a modern sense, James Bond, Batman, etc.).