초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This essay aims to trace the revisionary history of romance ranging from chivalric romance to the bildungsroman. Chivalric romance becomes a dominant narrative form that represents the diverse variations of medieval romance with the passing of the High Middle Ages. Unlike heroic epic throwing martial heroism into relief, this genre creates its own genetic identity by gradually highlighting high ideals and love of an illustrious knight. Yet it undergoes a serious change with the rise of the early modern and modern periods. Many contemporary writers make great efforts to modernize romance to exhibit modern manners and lives. They attempt to bring together the high life of romance and the low life of the novel. It turns out that romance gets novelized and novel gets ennobled. By make an anthropological turn of romance into a scrutiny of human nature, modern romance reformers like William Godwin complete this novelization of romance. In his famous essay "Of History and Romance," (1797) Godwin argues that a true romance writer should study the "individual history" of human character. A new romance should pursue personal transformations through which an individual should aspire for republican ideal, he claims. His genetic revision is thus characterized by the radical humanization/internalization of romance. It follows that Godwinian romance turns into what later generations term bildungsroman. Godwin's work St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) exemplifies the modern refitting of romance into the bildungsroman. Although the time setting of the story is the sixteenth century, French nobleman Count Reginald de St. Leon, the title character of the story, changes his own identity from an aristocrat exerting chivalric knighthood at war through a gambler showing off aristocratic bounty at table and ultimately to a republican liberalist. Here the noble adventures of a chivalric knight turns into the novel adventures of a modern enlightener. Characterological transformations of the hero correspond to the genetic incorporation of romance into the bildungsroman plot. This self-transformative unfolding of romance consequently produces overdetermined textuaity; the narrative grammar for the education of formation domineers over the textual functions of other literary forms within the text of St. Leon. Godwin's modernization of romance as a study of an individual is particularly oriented toward his scientific perusal of a system of prejudiced thoughts. He senses that political influence in modern society becomes actualized through human consciousness. With this motivation worthy of notice, he strives for the systematic knowledge of ideological biases.
