This is a welcome collection of essays, ably edited, firmly oriented toward the future of criticism on romance. Despite the superb works on romance by Patricia Parker, Barbara Fuchs, and Helen Cooper, for example, the very frequency of critical recourse today to these same few volumes indicates the need for an expanded canon of theories, approaches, explanations, and attitudes to romance. This is especially the case for undergraduate and graduate students seeking to get a handle on this notoriously mercurial genre. Timely Voices is a worthy addition to that canon. Its fourteen essays travel across time as well as models of romance, from Old Irish literature to Jane Austen, giving substance to Steve Mentz's formulation of romance as a “polygenre.” Insisting on the transnational, transhistorical, and even interdisciplinary character of romance, the editor foregrounds romance writing and romance thinking as perhaps the most flexible form of creative process for the ages.

A strong and at times provocative introduction from Goran Stanivukovic describes the collection's interest in romance as “strategy” and “resource,” always ripe for reinvention. Stanivukovic presents the volume's conceptual framework as being rooted in the idea of influence, but “where influence is seen not as imitation but as testing the limits, or even the limitlessness, of the creative imagination” (5). The title of the collection comes from Spenser, though it is, sometimes counterintuitively, invoked for a sense of romance writers reaching across time to past and future. And yet the collection itself is a timely one, in the more conventional sense, as both an introduction to and overview of romance and its possibilities across the centuries (but primarily early modern), while also introducing new kinds of potential approaches. Facing in both directions so concertedly, this book is a relatively rare creature. Adding to the volume's usefulness, an afterword by Patricia Parker provides a generous literature review of approaches to romance from the generation of Vinaver and Frye to the most recent important monographs, many by contributors to this collection.

Beyond the introduction, we meet a mixture of innovative essays with richly rewarding forays into the less traveled byways of romance (incident, domestication, the everyday) with more traditional, narratological or taxonomic approaches whose innovation lies in their westward expansion of the networks of the European romance tradition to encompass early medieval works from Wales and Ireland. Despite the emphasis on romance as “strategy” and “resource” in the introduction, there is nonetheless some divergence among authors in terms of how they discuss romance as a genre, mode, style, structure, writing strategy, or discourse. But all of them share a strong sense of romance proliferation as a defining principle both of its writing and reading, of “movement as a resource of romance writing” (62); romance does not simply contain but sustains multitudes.

Highlights for me include a sophisticated essay by Colin Lahive on the continuity but variety of Milton's uses of romance as part of his theological thinking; Nandini Das's engagingly written essay on the uses of the everyday as part of the superstructure of wonder we commonly adduce of romance; and Helen Cooper's lovely essay on the knight and the hermit—deceptively simple in its focus but elaborating a really useful survey of pre- and post-Reformation romance. Steve Mentz shows typical verve in pulling together a new theory of “polygenres” from Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant's model of “relation,” and literary critic Caroline Levine's affordance-based model of genre systems, together with an illustrative case study: Pericles—an “outlier” in Shakespeare's canon since its omission from the First Folio, but in this formulation, emblematic of the plural genre systems of the entire early modern tradition. A striking feature of the collection is its willingness to analyze romance thinking into the nineteenth and twentieth century, in Marcus Waithe's essay on the uncanny in William Morris and David Jones, and Sara Malton's piece on the financial romance of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. Another useful tendency is the authors’ interest in taking stock of the reputation of romance in its own moment—for example, as a form closely associated with women, as the essay by Hero Chalmers explores, or in the “teasingly absent presence” (222) of Heliodorus's Aethiopica in seventeenth-century English drama.

I would recommend this book as much to scholars of romance in all its guises as to students seeking ways into the scholarship of this vital, enduring literary form.