Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories?

This volume focuses on Anglophone romantic historical fiction that involves stories of travel, tourism and migration in both past and present. It considers how women’s historical fiction can narrate stories of healing and reparation, but may also dangerously replicate colonial discourse in its exoticist revisions of the past.

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

Contributor: Paloma Fresno-Calleja (Edited by), Hsu-Ming Teo (Edited by)

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