Romance novel

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A romance novel is a novel whose central theme is love . Although many romance novels are to be classified as trivial (see below ), the term basically also includes works of high literature . The historical precursors of the modern romance novel - both in its trivial literary and in its highly literary form - include the baroque shepherd novel , the gallant novel and the English moral novel of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Unlike z. For example, in English-speaking countries, where great attention is paid to the literary topic , subjects and motifs are traditionally in the foreground in German philology . Overarching representations of the highly literary romance novel are therefore still rare in German-speaking countries.

Examples of romance novels that are significant in literary history

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Many newer romance novels can also be assigned to high literature , e.g. B .:

Highly literary and trivial romance novel

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Not every novel that is central to love, focuses on the representation of the private or tries to move the reader, is trivial literature. There is no precise definition.
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The popular romance novel (also: Liebes und Familienroman) describes an extensive genre of trivial literature that is primarily aimed at the female readership and its structure mostly follows simple basic patterns. Often it is in the form of serialized novels , pulp magazines and paperbacks before, in German-speaking countries in the form of booklet novels .

History of the trivial love novel

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The English authors who are so important for the genre (Richardson, Austen, Brontë sisters) are missing.
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The genesis of the love and family novel is directly related to the social situation of the bourgeoisie under late feudal rule. This citizen was increasingly dependent on gaining economic and political influence in order to survive alongside the ruling nobility. Especially in relation to the development and implementation of new bourgeois moral and value concepts and lifestyle, the question of correct behavior in the home and family was of great importance. While this problem was already addressed in the “Moral Weekly”, from the 18th century the Enlightenment began to use the new medium “ Roman ” to pursue the question of the possibilities of domestic happiness and to nourish stories with the description of private fates. This resulted in the so-called moral didactic, touching family novel.

drama

As early dramatic works of trivial family and love literature, the touching pieces August Wilhelm Iffland ( Verbrechen aus Ehrsucht , Die Mündel ) or August von Kotzebues ( hatred and repentance as well as The noble lie ) should be mentioned. These works already reflected the characteristics of family and love literature that are characteristic to this day: restriction to the private individual fate and conveyance of emotionality.

Besides Iffland and Kotzebue, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer should be mentioned as an important representative , who between 1830 and 1860 enjoyed the reputation of “ruler of the German stage”. She wrote more than 20 family dramas alone, such as B. Trudchen , Eine Familie , Das Forsthaus or Rose and Röschen .

prose

In the prose section particularly four authors played a decisive role: August Lafontaine ( The violence of love , family histories , the step-siblings ), Friedrich August Schulze , who was known by the pseudonym "Friedrich Laun" ( marriage histories , three kisses and a long night , family happiness ) , Gustav Schilling ( The Bride Show , Domestic Pictures ) and Heinrich Clauren ( Passion and Love , Das Dijon-Röschen , Vielliebchen ).

After these works were produced between 1780 and 1830, a new wave of trivial family and love literature did not begin again until the 1860s. A large number of women began writing during this period. Many of them shaped the image of the family paper Die Gartenlaube , such as E. Marlitt , whose works - e. B. Goldelse , The Secret of Old Mamsell or The Woman with the Karfunkelsteinen - were bestsellers and found far more readers than more famous contemporaries such as Theodor Fontane; Since the love story merely holds the plot together in Marlitt, while completely different events are in the foreground, the classification of her work as romance fiction has occasionally also been disputed.

Furthermore, Wilhelmine Heimburg , Elisabeth Bürstenbinder or Anny Wothe should be mentioned in the area of ​​the trivial love novel .

Family and love literature of the 20th century

German-speaking area

At the beginning of the 20th century, Hedwig Courths-Mahler's unsurpassed success began, whose novels were printed within half a century with a total circulation of around 30 million copies. Her most successful works include the other's honor , Meine Käthe , an unloved woman , the beautiful unknown or spurned . In addition to Courths-Mahler, only two other women writers were important in this literary field: Helene Butenschön, who appeared under the pseudonym " Fr. Lehne ", and Anny von Panhuys .

Little by little, family and romance novels also appeared in the novel booklet series that had become popular since the beginning of the 20th century . Although they were only weakly represented until the end of the First World War - for example through the series Intimate Stories or What Not to Tell Loud - they were also able to advance in the course of time with the Little Master novels or the series Women of Today establish.

The heyday of family and love literature in West Germany did not begin until after 1949. In the GDR, on the other hand, this literature was not produced, but even all existing works were disposed of as part of cultural policy . In the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, family and romance novels soon made up more than half of all booklet series, with a decline to around 35 percent since 1958. These series include Mein Roman , Romane des Herzens , Linden-Roman , Roman am Sonnabend or Bastei-Familien-Roman .

Current examples of modern love and family literature are the literarily valuable novel Die Liebesblödigkeit by Wilhelm Genazino , the stories Reiche Mädchen by Silke Scheuermann , PS Ich liebe dich by Cecelia Ahern or the novel last days, now by Jan Drees .

United States

In the United States in 1972 a new type of high-profile romance novels emerged, which are known as "romance novels" and, in contrast to traditional novels, do not go through a phase before the paperback edition in which they are only offered as an expensive bound book, but directly as cheaply made Mass Market Paperback to be produced. The start was in 1972 so-called " Bodice Ripper " (German: Nackenbeißer ), schema novels in historical garb, which tell the emotionally and erotically intense stories of irresistible and headstrong young women, those of attractive and daring men of the " alpha male " type little by little be conquered and led to great love. As early as the 1970s, this type of romance experienced a broad thematic diversification and today includes e.g. B. also contemporary novels, fantasy stories, vampire novels and westerns, which all have a central love story.

See also

literature

High literature

  • Reinhold Merkelbach; Titus Heydenreich (Ed.): Liebesroman. Love in a novel , Universitäts-Bund Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen 1987, ISBN 3-922135-49-8 .
  • Rafał Pokrywka (ed.): The love novel in the 21st century , Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2017. ISBN 978-3-8260-6153-0 .
  • Otto Weinreich : The Greek romance novel , Artemis, Zurich 1962 DNB 455430497 .

Trivial literature

  • Dorothee Bayer: The trivial family and romance novel in the 20th century . Tubingen 1963
  • Dorothee Bayer: Wrong inwardness. To the family and romance novel . In: Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel u. a. (Ed.): Trivial literature. Essays . Berlin 1964
  • Hainer Plaul: Illustrated history of trivial literature . Olms, Hildesheim 1983; 1988 ISBN 978-3-487-08251-6 (also: Verlag Edition Leipzig, Leipzig)

Web links

Wiktionary: Romance novel  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gero von Wilpert : Specialized Dictionary of Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 231). 6th, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-520-23106-9 .
  2. ^ E.g. Paula Kay Montgomery: Approaches to literature through theme , 1992
  3. ↑ The poison of attachment
  4. ↑ Etude on human mating behavior