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Romance is the structural core of all fiction.
- Northrop Frye
If you think of a novel in the vague you think of a love interest.
- E. M. Forster
A romance plot does not focus on women coping with contemporary social problems and issues.
- Jayne Ann Krentz
You have to submit to the huge power of the genre you are in. Genre really does determine outcomes.
- Martin Amis
I
The genre of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) has seemed patently self-evident at least since 1958, when Raymond Williams grouped together a number of early and mid-Victorian novels, including North and South, under the name 'industrial novels' in his influential Culture and Society, and when Arnold Kettle discussed the same group of novels as 'social-problem novels' in an essay in the new Penguin Guide to English Literature. In 1966, in an essay on H.G. Wells's Tono-Bungay in his book Language of Fiction, David Lodge referred to the same group of novels as 'condition-of-England' novels. As well as identifying a sub-genre of the Victorian novel, Williams, Kettle and Lodge also defined the terms in which these novels would be discussed for the next half-century, including Catherine Gallagher's The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985) and Josephine M. Guy's more recent The Victorian Social-Problem Novel (1996). While this approach has produced illuminating readings of Victorian 'condition-of-England' novels, it has virtually ensured that these novels, including North and South, are discussed almost exclusivel in terms of their intervention in the 'condition-of-England' debate of the 1840s and 1850s, and especially debates about industrialization and the class conflict it produced. 'The industrial novels of early Victorian England', says Deirdre David in Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981),
are very often primarily regarded as a source of information about indus- trial conditions, and then secondarily as novels in themselves with all the attendant difficulties that have to do with the relationship between the actuality of those conditions and their transformation into fiction. The industrial novel for us, as twentieth-century readers, provides invaluable depictions of a society in the process of unprecedented and disturbing alteration, and, for readers of the time, offered glimpses of unknown terri- tory.1
Rosemarie Bodenheimer makes a similar point in The Politics of...