Introduction: Travel and colonialism in twenty-first century romantic historical fiction: exotic journeys, reparative histories?

This chapter introduces the main arguments of this book, which focuses on a recent corpus of Anglophone romantic historical fiction narrating stories of women's journeys to various exoticised locations where they experience conflicts as well as romantic love. This chapter starts by framing our analysis within the fields of popular romance studies and studies of women's historical fiction and explaining our preference for the term “romantic historical fiction”. It provides a brief survey of the development of women's travel writing from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and the connections between women's travel and romantic narratives set in exotic locales. It then offers an overview of how exotic settings have been intrinsic to the development of romance fiction in different historical periods and moves on to consider the uses and abuses of this exotic material in contemporary romantic novels which reinforce or revise this Orientalist legacy. It concludes by briefly introducing the chapters included in the volume.