Chapter 1 Introduction
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Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction
Routledge
Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction
Routledge
Abstract
Description
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.
Keywords
Caribbean Historical Romance,Neo-Historical Novels,Sarah Lark,Michelle Paver,Colonial Kenya,Colonial South Africa,Jennifer McVeigh,The Fever Tree,Leopard at the Door,Tragedy,Love,Great Famine,Irish Diaspora,Civil War,The Faithless Wife,Romance,Pacific War, thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism, thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism::DSK Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, thema EDItEUR::N History and Archaeology::NH History::NHT History: specific events and topics::NHTQ Colonialism and imperialism