Romance Storyworlds
摘要
This chapter analyses recurrent features of romance storyworlds (in other words, the settings where the stories unfold). Adopting a systematic approach to the storyworlds of Middle English Breton lays, it identifies a number of typical characteristics of romance treatment of space: spatial indeterminacy (the notorious lack of precision of romance), spatial discontinuity (where space appears as series of dots, rather than as a surface), spatial looseness (the absence of geographical connections between settings in the storyworld), or spatial elasticity (the ability for the storyworld to expand and retract in the narrative). It also elaborates on the notion of romance “polyspace,” which refers to the ontologically heterogeneous nature of romance storyworlds: romance connects the ordinary world of the storyworld with “metaspaces” that exist beyond it, like the Christian metaspace where Providence watches over human experience in the ordinary world, or the fairy metaspace which seems to exist in a world parallel to that of human experience. Due to the potential ability of romance places (and beings, vegetal, animal, or human) to turn into connective devices between these dimensions of space, romance polyspaces are fundamentally marked by ontological lability, so that the storyworld is best defined in terms of spatial “thickness.”