ABSTRACT
A more obvious generic place to start might be Romance, though, like the novel, it is easier to define by its inclusiveness than its boundaries. The eighteenth-century apologists for the novel defined the 'new' novel form by its anti-romance truthfulness, and, as late as Henry James's seminal preface to The American, romance and realism are presented as polar opposites within fiction. Anti-romance as a truth-telling top os is common in our period, too. Nashe attacks those who attempt 'to repair the ruinous walls of Venus's court, to restore to the world that forgotten legendary licence of lying, to imitate afresh the fantastical dreams of those exiled abbey-lubbers, from whose idle pens proceeded those worn-out impressions of the feigned nowhere acts, of Arthur of the Round Table ... with infinite others'.s Don Quixote, the greatest European prose fiction of the period, translated into English as early as 1612, is posited on the contrast between booklearnt romance chivalry and real life. The joke in Don Quixote is that the modern world is just as full of illusion and enchantment (at least, in the hero's mind) as that of the romance.
