Cailey Hall engages with contemporary queer historical romances set in the long eighteenth century as counternarratives to established conventions in which queer relationships uniformly ended in tragedy. Too often in eighteenth-century studies the emphasis is on mourning—on grieving Black enslavement, Indigenous displacement, anti-queer and transphobic violence—but criticism that ends with a metonymic association of queerness with death or loss may only reinscribe these correspondences and deny other possibilities for queer being and belonging in myriad geographies of the eighteenth century. We seek here not rose-colored optimism but also not a mind-numbing nihilism; if such a happy medium is possible, Unsettling Sexuality reaches for it. (13)
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Chapter 5, Cailey Hall’s “Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels,” pivots to contemporary reimaginings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intimacies in recent queer romance novels. Hall considers Olivia Waite’s Regency romance novel, The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (2019), as an exemplum of the recent turn to queer historical romance within romance publishing. For Hall, Waite’s novel offers a counternarrative to the assumption that queer historical love stories are inevitably tragic and, in doing so, meditates on the affordances and limits of reparative archival practices that inflect romance novels’ speculative dimensions. (14)
The introduction states that:
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