Jane Austen's hapax legomenon

[sartorias]

Three requests will usually do it, but since the beginning of the year I've had like over a dozen queries boiling down to, "Where is that thing you wrote about the difference between Austen and Heyer?" so here it is in reprise.

Comments

[whswhs]

Romance is a problematic term. I was talking a few weeks ago with rhinogirl and I referred to her novel as a "romance"-because its PoV character is a young woman, because she's attracted to a guy who's socially graceful and bad (the heir to a rival magical dynasty)-though trying to get better-while another guy is attracted to her who's rough-hewn, sarcastic, and socially lower than she is, because a lot of the plot revolves around this and its seeming resolution (not arrived at by the end of Cast into Darkness) turns on her choice of one or the other and the political issues seem peripheral to that, and because there's a very strong sense of social hierarchy as the key to male desirability. And she maintained that what she wrote was not at all a romance, because romance has a definite series of conventions that she didn't follow. I didn't follow what she said about what those conventions were well enough to restate them, but clearly there are literary things here that I'm not aware of.

The thing that I liked best about Her Majesty's Dragon was the scene where Captain Lawrence realizes that he has put himself in a false moral position by accepting the friendliness of another captain who treats his dragon badly, and that he needs to redeem himself and isn't quite sure how. That had more than a drop of the real Austen flavor; her characters have moral seriousness about their own lives, and that makes them more interesting to read about.

I find it cool that you use a Greek rhetorical term to make your point.

[sartorias]

Yeah . . . romance is a slippery term, but I've read books that I thought partook of the tropes and language of romance, yet the authors insisted the books were not romance.

romance

[whswhs]

from Pilgrimsoul

Since LOVE is so important a human emotion--I don't get the disdain for Romance. Doesn't this powerful feeling show humans as they really are?

Re: romance

[sartorias]

Well, there are arguments that romance DOESN'T show humans as they are, but I think that's a debate for another time.

Re: romance

[breathingbooks]

Or at least not as they generally are, brief spurts of temporary craziness aside *g*.

[kalimac]

To what extent is this like "it's not science fiction without robots or spaceships"?

[whswhs]

I don't know. I'm not familiar enough with genre romance to have an informed opinion of what its essential elements are.