Aspects Of Romance In F. Scott Fitzgerald's “the Offshore Pirate” And Jean Sasson’s Desert Royal

Résumé: This article delves into two works that fit into Northrop Frye's influential literary theory on the structures and archetypes of literature as romance stories. His lens provided a scope through which we analyzed F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story The Offshore Pirate and Jean Sasson’s Desert royal. Frye's conceptualization of romance as a narrative pattern involving the protagonist's journey mapped neatly onto the narrative arc of our selected works. Our analysis revealed the underlying patterns of the stories that went from an initial state of innocence all the way through tribulations, emerging finally in the recognition of the hero. The protagonists were thus read as the archetypical heroes who served to showcase the intricacies of the romance, keeping simultaneously the lightheartedness of the stories in accordance with its representation as the mythos of summer. Both desert and sea kidnapping of the heroines shed light on some aspects of romance as elaborated by Frye. The popularity of desert romance during the twenties emanates from the discourse of orientalism, which we can find in other narratives of the current century.

Publié dans la revue: الممارسات اللّغويّة