From Pleasure to Terror

In the sixteenth century, romance seemed dangerously Catholic. For Roger Ascham, notoriously, the genre belonged to a time “whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England.”¹ By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, on the other hand, it seems to have become eastern, exotic, even Islamic. “That peculiar and arbitrary species of Fiction which we commonly call Romantic,” Thomas Warton wrote, “appears to have been imported into Europe by a people, whose modes of thinking, and habits of invention, are not natural to that country”; that is, “It is generally supposed to have been borrowed from the Arabians.”² From an idolatrous literary form, romance became the product of a racially alien mentality, something like Shaftesbury’s “mysterious race of black enchanters.”³ For Warton, this othering of romance secures a certain confidence about Europe as a unitary cultural space capable of absorbing and civilizing the “extravagant” and “capricious” imagination of the Arabs: Warton associates both the Arabs and romance with an imaginatively fertile but archaic and unruly past from which he and his readers can feel themselves comfortably enough removed to see it as a source of aesthetic pleasure and a wellspring of the sublime (ii, lxxiii). When Ascham thinks of romance, he associates it with something alien in the very recent past, an abyss separating sixteenth-century England from its authentic cultural and spiritual origins and still dividing it in his own moment; when Warton imagines the Arab origins of romance, all of Europe becomes in his words “that country,” as if the specter of Arab difference had the power to make a nation out of a continent and to bring Europe into being as a coherent cultural entity.