230535 Romance Fiction, or: How the f**k did we get from Sir Lancelot to Edward Cullen? (S) (WiSe 2014/2015)

Romance is a literary genre that recounts, in a manner only loosely related to realism, legendary feats of heroism undertaken by the feudal aristocracy, including the general themes of identity-formation, romantic love, purification-by-ordeal, and salvation (a.k.a . ‘living happily ever after’). Romance was born and developed in the later 12th century in France and spread to other parts of Europe including Angevin England and … 600 years later … popular bookshops and lending libraries and … 800 years later … airport bookshops and the world’s cinemas and tv screens. How much (or little) have the fantasies, the gender stereotypes, the power relations channelled in romance changed since it was first invented? How do the masterplots and archetypes of myth and folk tale survive in films like Love, Actually or teenie blockbusters like Twilight? To what extent are the fantasies of romance culture-specific? And how do we deal with the cognitive dissonance between the ‘medieval’ (or worse, Victorian) ideologies peddled in popular romance and our own enlightened(?), emancipated(?) concepts of identity and gender?

Literaturangaben

To be announced; but we will definitely look at the most popular and influential English romantic novels of all times: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.