Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

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 womens 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.