Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

Paloma Fresno-Calleja is Professor of English at the University of the Balearic Islands. Her research focuses on New Zealand and Pacific literatures on which she has published book chapters and articles in a number of international journals. She is co-editor (with Hsu-Ming Teo) of Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History (2024), (with Janet Wilson) of Beyond Borders: New Zealand Literature in the Global Marketplace (Routledge, 2023) and (with Melissa Kennedy) of a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, "Island Narratives of Persistence and Resistance" (2023). She has been lead researcher of two research projects devoted to the study of popular romance and financed by the Spanish government: "The politics, aesthetics and marketing of literary formulae in popular women’s fiction: History, Exoticism and Romance" (2016–2020), and "Romance for Change: Diversity, Intersectionality and Affective Reparation in Contemporary Romantic Narratives" (2022–2025).Hsu-Ming Teo is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Macquarie University, Australia. Her publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012) and the edited book The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (2017). She co-edited Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History (2024) with Paloma Fresno-Calleja, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020) with Jayashree Kamblé and Eric Murphy Selinger, and Cultural History in Australia (2003) with Richard White. She has published widely on popular romance, romantic love, Orientalism, imperialism, historical fiction, and popular culture.

• List of ContributorsAcknowledgements1. Introduction: Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories?. Paloma Fresno-Calleja and Hsu-Ming Teo2. Falling in Love Outside of the Law: Piracy, Race, and Freedom in Caribbean Historical Romance. Sarah H. Ficke 3. Caribbean Plantation Life through Rose-Tinted Glasses: The Romantic Neo-Historical Novels of Sarah Lark and Michelle Paver. Irene Pérez-Fernández4. (Mis)Guiding Readers through Colonial Kenya and South Africa: The Fetishisation of the Dark Continent in Jennifer McVeigh’s The Fever Tree and Leopard at the Door. Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez 5. Narrating Tragedy through Love: Romance, the Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in Romantic Historical Novels Set in Ireland. Pilar Villar-Argáiz 6. “Sun, sex, secrets and a very uncivil war”: Menorca, the Spanish Civil War and the pact of forgetting in Jo Eames’ The Faithless Wife. Miquel Pomar-Amer 7. “The Most Romantic Place On Earth”: Exoticism, Militourism and Romance in Women’s Historical Fiction of the Pacific War. Paloma Fresno-Calleja 8. Post/Colonial Nostalgia and Melancholia in Dinah Jefferies’ The Tea Planter’s Wife and Before the Rains. Hsu-Ming Teo and Astrid Schwegler-CastañerIndex

“By insightfully exploring how the use of “exotic” settings as backdrops for stories of female empowerment remains entangled with the legacies of colonialism, this volume ably demonstrates the ongoing tensions between the politics of race and gender in the modern Anglophone travel romance.”-Joseph Crawford, Associate Professor, University of Exeter, UK“Romantic historical fiction strives to balance fact and reparative fantasy, love, and justice. Attentive to the long histories of women’s writing, travel literature, and popular fiction, these essays are the Baedeker we need to understand the genre – and its limits. Long ago and far away, meet the here and now.”--Eric Murphy Selinger, Professor, DePaul University, USA