This collection of thirteen specially commissioned essays by international scholars takes a fresh look at the profound impact of the Peninsular War on Romantic British literature and culture. The expertly authored chapters explore the valorization of Spain by nineteenth-century poets such as Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, S.T. Coleridge, the Shelleys, and Felicia Hemans in contrast to the Enlightenment-era view of Spain as a backwards nation in decline. Topics discussed include the vision of Spain in Gothic fiction, Spanish experiences of exile as exemplified by the conflict between Valentin de Llanos and Joseph Blanco White, and British women writers' approach to peninsular fiction. Spain in British Romanticism: 1800-1840 is essential reading for scholars and enthusiasts of Romantic literature and Spanish history.
British culture of the Romantic period is distinguished by a protracted and varied interest in things Spanish. The climax in the publication of fictional, and especially poetical, narratives on Spain corresponds with the intense phase of Anglo-Iberian exchanges delimited by the Peninsular War (1808-14), on the one hand, and the Spanish experiment of a constitutional monarchy that lasted from 1820 until 1823, on the other. Although current scholarship has uncovered and reconstructed several foreign maps of British Romanticism - from the Orient to the South Seas - exotic European geographies have not received much attention. Spain, in particular, is one of the most neglected of these 'imaginary' Romantic geographies, even if between the 1800s and the 1820s, and beyond, it was a site of wars and invasions, the object of foreign economic interests relating to its American colonies, and a geopolitical area crucial to the European balance designed by the post-Waterloo Vienna settlement. This study considers the various ways in which Spain figured in Romantic narrative verse, recovering the discursive materials employed in fictional representation, and assessing the relevance of this activity in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in contemporary British culture. The texts examined here include medievalizing and chivalric fictions, Orientalist adventures set in Islamic Granada, and modern-day tales of the anti-Napoleonic campaign in the Peninsula. Recovering some of the outstanding works and issues elaborated by British Romanticism through the cultural geography of Spain, this study shows that the Iberian country was an inexhaustible source of imaginative materials for British culture at a time when its imperial boundaries were expanding and its geopolitical influence was increasing in Europe and overseas.
This diverse volume focuses on British reactions to, and representations of, Spanish affairs during the lively period following the Peninsular War (1814-1823). The essays offer literary, social, historical and cultural perspectives that bring both fresh light to this formative period and a wealth of new scholarly material.
Structures of Feeling makes available two decades of work by the pioneering scholar of Spanish cultural studies, Jo Labanyi, covering literature, cinema, painting, photography, and memory studies, with a frequent focus on gender. The essays explore the ways in which cultural texts serve as a vehicle for negotiating cultural anxieties, through their encoding of emotional structures that reveal social tensions and contradictions. The discussion of a wide range of Spanish texts, from the early nineteenth-century to the present, traces stages in the history of the emotions and their imbrication in political processes. The essays have in common an attempt to read against the grain; in many cases, the focus on gender is what makes that possible. Jo Labanyi is a Fellow of the British Academy, and the founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. She is now Professor of Spanish at New York University.
In Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, the authors assess British Romanticism’s creative and polemical engagements with the Peninsular War, the bid of Spanish American colonies to establish independence with British support, and the impact of travel narratives about Spain and the Americas. The essays analyze questions of language and translation in Anglo-Hispanic literary genealogies, the representation of war and nationalism in poetry, drama, and prose, and the confluence of empire, gender, and authorship in travel narratives. Scholars and students of Romanticism will find in-depth explorations of the relationship between Britain, Spain, and Latin America during the Napoleonic era and its afterlife in cultural memory.
Throughout the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth centuries, Spain served as a cultural, religious and commercial rival to England. Over the course of those three centuries, a body of anti-Spanish thinking, the Leyenda Negra, or Black Legend, was brought into being in English print culture. The image of the Spaniard as proud, cruel, tyrannical, benighted, and savage was firmly ensconced in the English cultural imagination, and Spain became a predictive imagined geography figuring brutality, repression, and false belief.
This book uses the theme of 'debatable lands', to explore aspects of writing in the Romantic period. Walter Scott brought it to a wider public, and the phrase came to be applied to debates which were intellectual, political or artistic. These debates are pursued in a collection of essays grouped under the headings such as 'Britain and Ireland'.
