1st Edition
Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction Repairing the Past, Repurposing History
This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose, and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice, and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION: Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History
Hsu-Ming Teo and Paloma Fresno-Calleja
1. The Australian Convict Prostitute Romance: Narrating Social and Sexual Justice for “Damned Whores”
Hsu-Ming Teo
2. Repurposing a Trashed World: Twenty-First Century Caribbean Authors of Romantic Historical Fiction and the Legacy of British Imperialism
Ramón E. Soto-Crespo
3. Love in Victorian London: Immigrant Histories and Intersecting Diversities in K. J. Charles’s Sins of the Cities
Jayashree Kamblé
4. Language, Sexuality and “Necessary” Anachronism in Lorraine Heath’s (neo)Victorian Popular Romance Series, Scandalous Gentlemen of St. James
Carmen Pérez Ríu
5. Suffragette Historical Romances: Re-Purposing Women’s Suffrage in a Postfeminist Context
Mariana Ripoll-Fonollar
6. The US Civil War and its Aftermath in Historical Quaker Romances: Hailing White Heroines as Builders and Healers of the Nation
Carolina Fernández Rodríguez
7. Historical Reparation, Emotional Justice: The Navajo Long Walk in Evangeline Parsons Yazzie’s Her Land, Her Love
Silvia Martínez-Falquina
8. When a Jew Loves a Nazi: Problems with Repurposing the Holocaust for Reparative Romance
Hsu-Ming Teo
Index
Biography
Hsu-Ming Teo is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, and the Head of the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature 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 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.
Paloma Fresno-Calleja is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of the Balearic Islands. Her publications include Beyond Borders: New Zealand Literature in the Global Marketplace (co-edited with Janet Wilson, 2023) and a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies entitled “Island Narratives of Persistence and Resistance” (co-edited with Melissa Kennedy, 2023).
This innovative collection concentrates on an interesting but neglected form – the historical romance – and explores the ways in which this type of novel has been used by writers to explore complex and difficult issues including genocide, the colonial past, trauma, neo-colonialism and famine. The collection focuses on contested and challenging histories, and conceptualises the long-marginalised ‘romantic historical fiction’ as a crucial and important mode of writing. Often dismissed, the authors show that this category of writing is radical, thoughtful, experimental and profound in its engagement with questions of history, identity, gender and violence.”
Jerome De Groot, University of Manchester, UK
The collection dazzles! Editors Hsu-Ming Teo and Paloma Fresno-Calleja add new depth to the ever-growing field of romance studies by revealing possibilities and pitfalls of the ‘reparative reading of the past’ in women’s fiction. A must-have.
Catherine Roach, University of Alabama, USA
