Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction
Author | : Paloma Fresno-Calleja |
Publisher | : Taylor & Francis |
Total Pages | : 232 |
Release | : 2024-12-16 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781040305669 |
ISBN-13 | : 1040305660 |
Rating | : 4/5 (660 Downloads) |
Download or read book Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction written by Paloma Fresno-Calleja and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-12-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.