The Song Of Love And Adventure:The Lord Of The Rings As Romance

J.R.R.Tolkien is one of the best-selling British writers in the twentieth century.Studies on the genre of Tolkien’s magnum opus The Lord of the Rings are limited to crude comparison of generic features,neglecting the dynamic nature of genre itself.This thesis attempts first to highlight this dynamic nature of genre,and then explores the reciprocal relationship between romance and The Lord of the Rings on the basis of proposing romance as an appropriate candidate for the genre of Tolkien’s masterpiece.Modern genre theories have changed the way literary works are classified.Genres are not independently-working entities,but a changing system in which the "avatar" of a genre under a particular historical circumstance affects and is affected by the system which is constituted by a group of "avatars" from different historical eras.On this theoretical common ground,The Lord of the Rings’ inheritance and innovation of the romance genre are respectively addressed.Chapter One explores the dynamic nature of genre,resorting to the homogeneous ideas from theorists like Tzvetan Todorov,H.R.Jauss,as well as Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida.Narrowing down to the particular case of romance,this part of the thesis goes through the definitions of romance and its diachronic evolvement in history.Chapter Two looks upstream along the diachronic line of romance from the historical point where Tolkien’s trilogy stands,and tries to assert the authenticity of the romantic pedigree of The Lord of the Rings.This attempt is performed in two dimensions.The syntactic dimension deals with The Lord of the Rings’ adherence to the classic narrative tradition of romance,using Northrop Frye’s modeling of the romance structure.The semantic dimension copes with two of the most kernel motifs of romance tradition-the opposition of good and evil,and the binary of love and adventure.This part goes on to explain how Tolkien positions these two motifs in the semantic center of The Lord of the Rings.Chapter Three looks downstream along that diachronic line and illustrates The Lord of the Rings’ impact on the concept of romance.It identifies three aspects that represent the innovation Tolkien makes on the romance genre-introduction of bourgeois mentality,shift in emphasis from love to adventure,and synthesis with fantasy fiction to make the new form of fantasy romance.A converging place of tradition and innovation,The Lord of the Rings on one hand absorbs the generic merits of the romance tradition,and on the other extends the concept of romance.It exemplifies the dynamic nature of genre and opens up new topics whether to Tolkien or romance.