Literary Fiction from the Perspective of Romance Scholarship: André Aciman’s Room on the Sea

This Note reads André Aciman’s Room on the Sea (2025) in light of Gillian Beer’s The Romance (1970), a short treatise on the literary form from its origins to the modern era.[1] The protagonists of Aciman’s novella, a man and a woman in their sixties, casually meet while waiting to be possibly selected to serve