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ger: Romance as a literary phenomenon has a long and discontinuous history that is marked by rediscovery and modification. Notwithstanding a general agreement on unreality as an important element of romance narratives, the development and function of magic in romance has so far not been explored comprehensively. To meet this requirement, this thesis presents a study of modern (i.e. post-1800) British romance that adopts a specific focus on the magic element. In a structural approximation to the concepts of cognitive theory and by means of an analysis of five key texts it shows how the magic nature of romance manifests itself on three different levels: the levels of content, composition, and communication.
In a first step, it presents a history of the theory of prose romance which shows that British 'high-culture' romance, a genre that emerged as an offspring of medieval romance and as a consequence of the rise of the realistic novel in the eighteenth century, tells about love relationships, the completion of an adventurous quest (for a treasure, for love, and almost always for identity), and includes a certain, however small, influence of magic. Magic, which has variously been portrayed as false, ideal, dream-like, innately human, pleasing, and enchanting, forms an essential part of the genre and conveys the notion of romantic unreality. In a second step, this thesis aims at an aesthetics of romance as a genre, analysing Sir Walter Scott's The Monastery (1820), George MacDonald's Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858), H. Rider Haggard's She (1887), John Fowles's The Magus (1965/1978), and Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook (2000). Although not always the most striking feature of the genre, the focus on magic provides us with a fresh perspective on romance and allows us to present an alternative notion of the genre, which suggests that the genre's magical 'aura' affects the levels of content, composition, and communication. Firstly, its tendency towards magical exoticism, historicism, and revisionism reveals that in the confrontation with the unknowable, in magical storyworlds where borderlines are increasingly questioned, we might gain indirect access to our identity. Secondly, the magical organization and arrangement of story elements alludes to the wish to stay within and at the same time break out of preconceived patterns in favour of unpredictability, wish-fulfilment, and irrational modes of thought and systems of causation. And, finally, the opposition of narrative enchantment and disenchantment points to a scepticism about the power of language when dealing with the unreal, inviting the reader to participate in the 'magic of romance' and in its quest for a truth beyond physical reality.
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