Wonders at the Edge

Where there be monsters, there also be wonders

Anton Joseph von Prenner, “The Tower of Babel” (1761), after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, “The Tower of Babel” (1563), via Open Artstor Collection under Creative Commons

In whatever ways one considers our times to be modern, they remain medieval in at least one crucial respect: the phenomena we call “wonders,” described in spellbinding detail in Lorraine Daston’s and Katharine Park’s tome Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750. Since I’ve written about it in much greater detail elsewhere, here I’ll just say that Daston and Park distinguish between “wonder,” the experience, and “wonders,” a class of artifacts. And they further divide the class of artifacts into what they call “wonders of art,” or “artificial wonders,” and “wonders of nature.” When I first wrote about Daston’s and Park’s definition of wonder/wonders, I mentioned only in passing that wonders were “actual objects from the exotic margins” of the known world.¹ That point of their definition is actually quite important because it clarifies the relationship between wonders and an old-but-really-not-so-old, literary form called the romance, one trope of which is the acquisition of wonders in the margin beyond the known world.

If you’re confused by the use of the term “romance” here, there’s a good reason for it. Chances are, what comes to your mind is a pink- or purple-spined airport paperback with a cover featuring a buxom woman swooning into the arms of a half-bare, Fabio-looking dude. (If you’re too young to remember Fabio, here you go. And I’m sorry. But please learn something because I probably just sullied my Google ads and search results for all time getting you this link.) Basically, you’re likely thinking of a book that looks like one of these:

These covers teach us that a romance is about erotic love, the adventure needs to happen in big-sky nature somewhere (preferably Scotland, apparently), the genre’s become more racially inclusive (so that’s good), apparently “the look” has shifted from Fabio to Orlando Bloom, and if you want to sell a ton of them you apparently need recognition from USA Today. Glibness aside, these are some of the things we think of when someone uses the word “romance” in connection with literature²; but this kind of book is actually only a late iteration of a much older literary tradition, and it’s this older tradition that I’m addressing here.

Over the next few posts I’ll sketch the dimensions of the romance, first as a literary form evident in paragon cases, then as an enduring literary tradition that has evolved into literary forms we don’t now associate with the term “romance”—even though these newer forms are romances in the older sense of the term. We’ll see the ways the romance has been shaped by social, political, and economic forces, but also the ways it contributed to or even supported the social, political, and economic status quo at various moments in its development. And although this isn’t my main aim, along the way the slippage between our modern understanding of what a romance is and what it used to be will become clearer.

But why does the romance matter as we think about animalized machines and mechanized animal bodies? As you’ll see, as the romance evolved from a medieval literary form³ to a constellation of mass-market genres aimed at selling books, it and some of its descendants increasingly functioned as a design discourse, a space in which to imagine not only futuristic technologies but also their implications. The romance form was one of the primary influences on the novel, which bloomed in the nineteenth-century Anglophone world as literacy rates took off and modern mass transit suddenly created down time in the lives of work-a-day people, generating a huge new market for publishing. The concomitant cultural forces of scientific inquiry, imperial expansion, and industrialization all shaped the romance’s imaginative priorities, and as the public and private spheres negotiated their coexistence, a bevy of new genres (“new” as in “novel”) emerged to take on a broad swath of imaginative work. Tellingly, before Hugo Gernsback coined the nerdgasmic term “scientifiction” in 1926, which he remarketed as “science fiction” in 1929, there existed a constellation of novels that imagined the scientific and technological future, and this constellation was called “scientific romance.” Indeed, this is why, in defining “scientifiction,” Gernsback could resort to the relatively nontechnical definition, “the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” and why he referred to the authors of such stories as “the new romancers.”⁴

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Daston’s and Park’s history shows that the relationship between wonder and romance exists in a much denser nexus wherein we can recognize still other new romance forms. They argue that

the medieval rhetoric of the marvelous was first elaborated in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature of romance—in its rhapsodic descriptions of Eastern luxuries, its emphasis on quest and adventure, its exploitation of the unexpected, its taste for exotic settings, its reliance on magical natural objects, its constant invocation of wonder and wonders, described in terms of diversity, and its association of these wonders with wealth and power.⁵

Whether we think of the beauties of airport-paperback romances—the swords, and jewels, the idealized bodies of lovers, the natural wonders of romantic moons and afterglow-sunrises—or the marvels of science fiction—the lasers, blasters, lightsabers, droids, and myriad transportation machines, or the alien skies and vistas of undiscovered worlds and the sublimely vast distances traveled at warp speed—we are engaging wonders and marvels beyond the margins of what’s commonly known in our own places and time, if only in our imaginations.

We also see that romances foment desire for what lies at or beyond the margins. Daston and Park associate “the medieval rhetoric of the marvelous” with “rhapsodic descriptions of… luxuries,” a taste for the exotic, and the perennially-desired wealth and power. In many ways, the romance idealizes everything it touches: the natural landscape, the cultural setting, the characters, the wonders they encounter, even the margins of the known world, which, by merit of being unknown, beckon to the characters with all sorts of wild possibilities.

For this reason, the romance utopiates—it makes any place in some sense possibly a good place. And the same imaginary process can be turned backward—the romance can also dystopiate, which is why, after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), we see in literature so many lonely, forlorn, dark, gloomy, and dangerous places. The gothic is a dystopiating romance wherein wonders therefore turn to terrors or horrors.

With this fuller spectrum in mind, ranging from wonder to terror, the romance is always involved in a kind of propaganda, a play on readers’ (or, more recently, on viewers’ or players’) emotions. At the very least it seeks our attention but sometimes also solicits our subscription to some vision of how things might be, inspires a kind of religious devotion that we’ve taken to calling “fan culture.” And at times it has stoked patriotism. It has frequently primed us to give away our time and treasure, and sometimes, when there’s a war going on, our children. In other words, if you want to convince people to join some vision of the future based on a wondrous new technology, you’d best manipulate them with a romance that inculcates their desire for that future.⁶ Or—no grammatical surprise at this point—you must, as we say, romance them.

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To adequately trace the contours of the romance and see its idealizing, utopiating, and propagandizing effects, we need a case study. So consider this a formal invitation to a common reading. Over the next few posts I’ll exposit one of the English language’s signature romances, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, focusing on the way wonders work in it and showing the ways that animal bodies and the things we take from them once dead belong to that class of wonders. “SGGK,” as literary scholars like to call it, is a medieval poem in for “fitts,” four movements, and depending on how it’s printed, usually runs in the 50-100 page length. It feels archaic or perhaps foreign, but the action keeps moving and the characters are amusing and the descriptions of nature and animals are spellbinding, making it an accessible read, something you could tackle in a week if you had only 30 minutes to read per day.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading SGGK, I highly recommend the Tolkien-Gordon translation.⁷ Although originally written in English, SGGK was written in Middle English. Basically, literary historians of English divide the history of our language into three epochs: Old English or Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and Modern English. Old English is very Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon period is often dated, admittedly somewhat arbitrarily, to about 1150. By then the after-effects of the Battle of Hastings, where the French successfully invaded Britain, were felt in the thorough Frenchification of Old English, resulting in what we now call Middle English, which lasted roughly until the printing press began standardizing printed English around 1500. Invariably, when I teach Shakespeare, someone refers to the fact that his work is written in “Old English”; but Shakespeare is among the earliest Modern English writers. Archaic though his language may sound to us now, had he really been writing in Old English, we would not understand his works as well as we do, though it still requires work.

Finally, since so many of my readers are Americans it makes sense for us to ask, “Why should we care about archaic literary forms from England? Our people left there in 1776.” Well, for one, the romance literarily descends from the epic, and the epic’s action is usually defensive, a tight spot held against impossible odds or overwhelming opposition. By contrast, the romance is a riding-out, an adventuring into the unknown, an extension of its characters and their culture into the Great Beyond. There’s a natural transition from Homer’s Iliad to his Odyssey; there is also a natural transition from the American Revolution to the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, and the West-ward expansion of the California Gold Rush. Homer’s works may suggest to us that epic and the romance may be larger than the English-speaking world and its history—beyond English or even Western literary forms, they may reflect the way human cultures have developed: first by holding a spot, then by venturing out from it. However we understand their histories, it’s difficult to deny that they’ve shaped our own nation, culture, and society—right down to the present day. And reading them shows us just how true it is that we now live in what was once medieval Europe’s margin.

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.

1. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750 (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1998), 67-68. 

2. Look, if the trashy airport paperback romance is your jam, you do you. I loved Harry Potter and my wife’s a huge fan of mystery novels. But by and large, as a literary scholar, my tastes tend toward works that are at least fifty years old because they’ve already, in some sense, stood the test of time, suggesting that what they have to offer us is of enduring value. And since I’m in my forties and coming to terms with the shortness of life, I’m realizing I can’t read everything and am starting to opt for works that offer rich commentary on and insight into the nature of things, the human condition, and the hard work of knowing, and the created order, among other things. Generally speaking, books written and marketed to sell like, uh, hotcakes, aren’t offering such commentary.

3. Some would argue the romance is much older than medieval literature, that, for example, Homer’s Odyssey, which is similar in many respects to the medieval romances.

4. Hugo Gernsback, “A New Sort of Magazine,” Amazing Stories 1:1 (April, 1926): 3.  An electronic copy of this source is available online at https://archive.org/stream/AmazingStoriesVolume01Number01#page/n3.

5. Daston and Park, 33.

6. I’d contend this is the problem the A.I. folks are now facing—too many of the romances that imagined a future with A.I. have stoked our fear, anger, and sadness, which is to say they’ve inspired terror rather than wonder. The crypto folks made the same mistake.

7. In case it helps, the Simon Armitage translation of SGGK, while easy to understand, takes liberties that make me loath to recommend it.