I hardly need to re-hash some of the outrageous criticism of Romance, yet social media spews the same half-masticated ideas: romance isn’t “real literature,” romance readers just read trash, and romance books “don’t feel like real books.”
It’s all nonsense born of an overdeveloped sense of elitism and an undeveloped practice of checking definitions. In particular, checking the literary definition of a word being used in the literary world is sorely lacking as most influencers use the marketing terms.
This merely creates more confusion and the last thing any writer serious about their craft needs is more confusion.
One of the books I kept from college and still refer to—more frequently now that I am in the business of writing—is A Handbook to Literature by William Harmon and Hugh Holman. This is what amounts to a highly specialized dictionary specifically for literary terms. The difference between this and a regular dictionary is that the definitions have more meat to them and also include information about the history behind the term.
When I started my foray into Romance as my chosen medium for my written art, I pulled out the familiar blue paperback and started to walk through the pages again. I had the marketing terms for romance, but I wanted the literary definitions because these, I knew from experience, were more advanced and more complex than any dictionary definition could be.
Marketing changes on a whim, so do audiences; but literary definitions are more encompassing and enduring because they rely not only on the dictionary definition of the word, or the common use of the word, but on the entire use from its inception.
For romance writers in particular, this is the ultimate “gotcha” for our critics because when you know what the word means, and where it’s come from, you can dismantle some of the more ridiculous claims and, on top of that, actually sound more intelligent.
Let me show you what I mean. Let’s take the most innocuous term imaginable in our field: novel.
The Novel and the Roman
The dictionary definition of a novel isn’t as straightforward as you think. When I consulted my Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide, there are two entries for the word, plus a blurb that gives you a piece of the word’s history. Setting aside the second definition, because it has no bearing on this discussion, the first definition is where I’m going to focus my attention. The definition states that a novel is either “a fictitious story of book length” or, if preceded by “the,” “this type of literature.”
So, we at once have a definition that tells us what it is, and we have a definition that tells us that the novel is a type of literature. The word history goes into how it also referred to a novelty (which was the second definition for the word) or a piece of news.
Now, on to the Handbook definition.
The handbook definition is three pages long, to begin with, so quite impossible for me to give you the entirety in a single blog post. What I will point out is that the Handbook begins essentially with the same definition as the dictionary, but with the caution that it’s a broad definition. The next sentence gives it more shape:
In practice, however, its use is customarily restricted to narratives in which the representation of character occurs either in a static condition or in the process of development as the result of events or actions […] Often the term implies that some organizing principle—plot, theme, or idea—should be present in a narrative that is called a novel. (Harmon and Holman 254)
What this means is that a novel is a narrative that is organized around something that serves as the backbone of the whole piece. That core could be the plot itself, a theme, an idea, or even a combination of all three. The Count of Monte Cristo is organized around the idea of a man who is falsely accused of a crime and what he does after he escapes. Les Misérables is about a man who is disproportionately punished for his crime and spends the rest of his life hiding from Inspector Javert.
Now, this is where those of you who are romance writers will get really interested:
In most European countries the word roman is used rather than novel, thus linking the novel with the older romance, of which, in a sense, the novel is an extension. The conflict between the imaginative recreation of experience implied in roman and the realistic representation of the soiled world of common people implied in novel has been present in the form from its beginning, and it accounted for a distinction often made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the romance and the novel, in which the romance was the tale of the long ago, the far away, or the imaginatively improbable [sic]; whereas the novel was bound by the facts of the actual world and the laws of probability. (Harmon and Holman 354)
Let’s unpack that for a bit. The part about roman being a term used for “novel” is absolutely true. Even those of you who know the word Bildungsroman will notice that “roman” is in the last part of the word. This is, of course, the “coming of age” novel derived from Goethe’s work. The reason why in English we call a roman a novel is because our word is derived, by way of the Italian novella—a word that is still in use today to indicate a very short novel.
The rest of the definition I quoted speaks very specifically about how (1) the novel is an extension of the older romance and (2) the differences between the two art forms.
What we can gain here is that the novel wouldn’t exist without the romance and that it was always understood that the novel was a form that was realistic while the romance was a form that dealt with the improbable and the fanciful.
You can see this same struggle between works like Orlando Furioso or Amadis of Gaul and Don Quixote.
What Does This Mean for Your Writing?
Marketing terms are there because they signal to the broader market what your book is about. They don’t actually define your book in the literary sense. If you’re only considering market terms, you’re not thinking like a writer; you’re thinking like a consumer.
The literary sense is more helpful when you are considering the story you’re writing and the art you’re creating. Markets change constantly. Literary terms only evolve and they provide you with a roadmap of what to look for, and even ideas for resources to consult.
This becomes even more important when you write romances because, as you can see from the definition, romances and novels were originally, and still are to an extent, two separate art forms with a common literary root.
Consider early medieval romances and their similarity to fantasy romances or even romantic fantasies. Now, if you are stuck and you’re trying to write either genre, you have resources to look and find out how other writers dealt with the same issues. Chrétien de Troyes may seem outdated for the 21st century, but if you scrape away some of the trappings, you’ll find attitudes that are surprisingly modern, such as the inevitability of love and the importance of individual morality.
This may not seem very important—not when your ultimate goal is to sell books—but I would encourage you to not think so dismissively. Literary terms open up a whole new world of possibilities that you may not have otherwise considered for your writing. Romance novels can be other things. They can be a roman noir—which is basically what Dark Romance is. They can also be a “novel of manners” like Jane Austen or a “novel of incident” like one of Fanny Burney’s novels. But if you don’t spend some time with literary terms, there’s not much of a way you can learn this just from observing the market.
Emily Henry novels aren’t sold as “novels of manners” any more than Callie Hart’s are sold as roman noir, even if both writers fit into those categories fairly neatly.
Literary terms give you better language to describe your own writing and to interact with other people, especially critics, about it. The market will tell you what’s selling; literary terms will tell you what you’re writing—and knowing the difference makes you a more deliberate, more powerful author.
Works Cited
Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. Prentice Hall, 2003.
Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide. Oxford University Press, 1999.
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