Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories?

Romantic fiction has often involved stories of travel. In narratives of the journey towards love, "romance" often involves encounters with "exotic" places and peoples. When history is invoked in such stories, the past itself is exoticised and treated as "other" to the present to serve the purposes of romanticisation: a narrative strategy by which all manner of things – settings, characters, costumes, customs, consumables – are made to perform a luxuriant otherness that amplifies the experience of love. This volume questions the reparative function of Anglophone romantic historical fiction to ask: can plots of travel and discourses of tourism empower women while narrating stories of healing for the wounds of the past? This is the first volume to consider how romanticised and exoticised women’s historical fiction not only serves the purposes of armchair travel but may also replicate colonial discourse, unintentionally positioning readers as neocolonial, neo-Orientalist cultural voyeurs as well as voyagers. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license Cover Endorsements Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Travel and Colonialism in Twenty-First Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories? 2. Falling in Love Outside of the Law: Piracy, Race, and Freedom in Caribbean Historical Romance 3. Caribbean Plantation Life through Rose-Tinted Glasses: The Romantic Neo-Historical Novels of Sarah Lark and Michelle Paver 4. (Mis)Guiding Readers through Colonial Kenya and South Africa: The Fetishisation of the Dark Continent in Jennifer McVeigh’s The Fever Tree and Leopard at the Door 5. Narrating Tragedy through Love: Romance, The Great Famine and The Irish Diaspora in Romantic Historical Fiction Set in Ireland 6. “Sun, Sex, Secrets and a Very Uncivil War”: Menorca, the Spanish Civil War and the Pact of Forgetting in Jo Eames’ The Faithless Wife 7. “The Most Romantic Place on Earth”: Exoticism, Militourism, and Romance in Women’s Historical Fiction of the Pacific War 8. Post/Colonial Nostalgia and Melancholia in Dinah Jefferies’ The Tea Planter’s Wife and Before the Rains Index