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.

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).

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