| dc.description.abstract | This short essay constiutes a reflection on meta-generic strategies and practises
employed by authors of romance fiction. Conceived as a response to Burkhard
Niederhoff’s article published in Connotations, it aims at making literary criticism and
romance fiction dialogue with one another by discussing several of the same texts
analysed by Niederhoff from the perspective of Romance Studies.
More specifically, this contribution to the debate on metagenre aims at making
available some of the concepts developed by scholars of the romance novel to literary
scholars. Adopting Pamela Regis’s definition of the happy ending as “betrothal,” the
essay sketches a short progression of this trope as heading towards increasingly visible
self-reflexive “metageneric” solutions. The outline begins with a discussion of E. M.
Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) as a “failed romance” which aims at
complementing Niederhoff’s reflections on the novel’s ending in connection to its
protagonist’s inner development and maturation. It continues with an examination of
E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) which focuses on “the bitter notes” hidden
within its apparently uncontentious happy ending, and it ends by analysing some of
the explicit metageneric devices employed in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (1969). | en_US |
