American Romance Novel Summary - Yenra

Richard Chase Quotes

South Carolina journalist and romancer William Gilmore Simms, in prefatory letter to The Yemassee (1835): "When I say that our Romance is the substitute of modern times for the epic or the drama, I do not mean to say that they are exactly the same things, an yet, examined thoroughly...the differences between them are very slight. These differences depend upon the material employed, rather than upon the particular mode in which it is used. The Romance is of loftier origin than the Novel. It approximates the poem. It may be described as an amalgam of the two.

The standards of the Romance . . . are very much those of the epic. It invests individuals with an absorbing interest--it hurries them rapidly through crowding and exacting events, in a narrow space of time--it requires the same unities of play, of purpose, and harmony of parts, and it seeks for its adventures among the wild and wonderful. It does not confine itself to what is known, or even what is probable. It grasps at the possible; and, placing a human agent in hitherto untried situations, it exercises its ingenuity in extricating him from them, while describing his feelings and his fortunes in the process" (Chase 16-17).

 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to The House of the Seven Gables: "When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as it its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation.

If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows, of the picture,. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and especially, to mingle the marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime, even if he disregard this caution" (Chase 18).

The American Novel and Its Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980.  

First paragraph of Chapter 4: "In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some bypaths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. I am going to err into such a bypath. If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad. At the least, we can promise ourselves that pleasure which is wickedly said to be in sinning, for a literary sin the divergence will be" (56).

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.