I'd like to talk about the "R/r" in romance - what it means when I use the capital "R" versus the lowercase "r". I know this might seem obvious to some of you, but it's an important point, because there is a big difference between, say, a Romantic hero and a romantic hero, and lines get blurred when I argue that the romantic hero IS the Romantic hero, as I am wont to do.
When I write the words romance or romantic with a lowercase "r", I am referring to romance as we define the term today, and when I refer to a "romance" or a "romantic" hero, I am referring to the hero of a romance fiction novel (for example, Wrath in Dark Lover), or, if I'm not pointing to a specific romance fiction text, to a character that embodies these "romance hero" characteristics. When I write "Romance" or "Romantic", I'm making a reference to the literature of the Romantic Period (approx. 1789-1837, though these numbers seem to shift depending on who one talks to). The Romance or Romantic hero is a character who embodies certain Romantic characteristics (for example, Manfred in Byron's Manfred is a Romantic hero). I will often refer to the Byronic hero as a Romantic hero, but technically he could be seen as a subcategory of the general Romantic hero type.
My academic argument (or rather, the argument I hope someday to make, in an Honour's or a Master's or a Ph.D thesis) is that not all Romantic heroes are romance heroes but all romance heroes are Romantic heroes. I realize that the "all" is problematic -- there are a lot of heroes in romance fiction today that do not have Romantic characteristics. However, the basic formula is a good point of departure.
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