Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

Know about the book -

Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction is written by Paloma Fresno-Calleja and published by Taylor & Francis. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1040305660 (ISBN 10) and 9781040305669 (ISBN 13).

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.