Summer, Romance

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Northrop Frye in his book Anatomy of Criticism has pointed to summer as the season for romance. This isn't talking about romance in the sense of boy meets girl and all the things we associate with "romantic" in movies and books today here. It's not about sexual love, but about quests and knights and idealism... that sort of thing. We're talking here Arthur and his Knights. That's the typical idea of a "romance."

In Frye's scheme, the various genres are represented by a season, and summer is for romance. It is preceded by spring's comedy, and followed by autumn's tragedy, with the yearly cycle ending in winter's irony/satire. Of course, in the death of the year's end, we are promised the renewal once again of spring.

Fantastic literature and speculative fiction is often thought of as fitting into summer, following the story arc of romance. All the stories of young heroes going off to find manhood and glory fit into this mold. A more dystopian type of writing, which is a large subgenre of speculative fiction in its own right, would fit more with a winter motif. But, still, summer seems to reign supreme in many fantasy novels.


 Subscribe in a reader

Anatomy of Criticism

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism offers an excellent overview of the importance of genre and the conventions of genre in both the making and the interpreting of a text. I've found it, over the years, a very useful paradigm for approaching any work, including even films or books that are very much treated as "pop culture," as if that somehow implies they are unworthy of more serious attention. I wrote some months back about Hollywood films and how Frye's thought might be applied to a certain trend we see coming from Hollywood these days.

I really love some of the things Frye has to say about the fantastic, and its place in the world of literature and art. His chapter on Romance (summer) has a lot to offer to any reader or writer who wants to approach fantasy and speculative fiction with a critical awareness of genre conventions. His work is one I would highly recommend for its erudite yet accessible approach to genre studies.


 Subscribe in a reader