British Periodicals and Spanish Literature
Mapping the Romantic Canon
Summary
of Spanish literature and culture in British Romanticism, this book focuses
on the instrumental role played by the British periodical press in the
Anglo-Spanish literary and cultural exchange in the first half of the nineteenth
century. All the chapters bear witness to the contrasting and varied
perception of everything Spanish, the different strategies of exploration, appropriation
and rewriting of its cultural and literary tradition. Besides, they
all reveal the intricate web of cultural, political and religious factors tinging
the discourse of British Romantic literary critics and authors on the Spanish
cultural capital.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents
- Introduction (María Eugenia Perojo Arronte and Cristina Flores Moreno)
- Part I Cultural Mediators
- Chapter 1 Literary Critics as Cultural Mediators between Spain and the United Kingdom in the Romantic British Press: The Case of Ángel Anaya (María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia)
- Chapter 2 Challenging the Canon: Spanish Exiles’ Articles on Spanish Literature in British Periodicals (1823–1834) (Sara Medina Calzada)
- Chapter 3 Selling Spain in the British Press during the 1830s: Advertisers as Cultural Mediators (Begoña Lasa-Álvarez)
- Part II Constructing the Canon
- Chapter 4 Shifting Views on the Political Nation: A Comparison of British and Spanish Criticism of Spanish Ballads (María Eugenia Perojo Arronte)
- Chapter 5 Blackwood’s “Horæ Hispanicæ” and the Conservative Construction of Spanish Literature (Diego Saglia)
- Part III Appropriating Classical Authors
- Chapter 6 Lope de Vega Reviewed in the British Romantic Periodical Press (1790s–1820s): Building the Spanish National Character (Cristina Flores Moreno)
- Chapter 7 Translating Calderón de la Barca in British Romanticism: The Texts by Mary Margaret Busk in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1825–1826) (Davinia Rodríguez-Ortega)
- Chapter 8 Cervantes, Sir Walter Scott and the Quixotic Satire on Erudition: Cervantean Echoes in Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) (Alfredo Moro Martín)
- Chapter 9 Idle English Reader: Romanticism and the Illustrated Reception of Don Quixote in England (Fernando González Moreno and Beatriz González Moreno)
- Part IV Appropriating Contemporary Authors
- Chapter 10 “A distinguished place in the Temple of the Muses”: Tomás de Iriarte’s Fables in the British Romantic Press (1795–1820) (Leticia Villamediana González)
- Chapter 11 Between Disdain and Disappointment: Three English Reviews of Martínez de la Rosa’s Obras literarias (Fernando Durán López)
- Chapter 12 “A more genuine and healthy tone in Spanish Literature”: Fernán Caballero in Britain (Daniel Muñoz Sempere)
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Figures
- Index
- Series index
Introduction
At the turn of the nineteenth century, German authors such as Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul Richter, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel placed Spanish literature at the top of the European cultural tradition and granted it a high status within the new literary system that took shape with the Romantic revolution. This had an impact upon British culture, favoured by the European political instability provoked by the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). The invasion of the Iberian Peninsula put an end to centuries of confrontation between Spain and Great Britain and gave way to a new political and military alliance. The conflict provoked a rampant Francophobia among the British, which was reasserted, in the cultural sphere, by new German literary trends, heavily biased against the French Enlightenment. Consequently, the British Romantics reacted against French eighteenth-century cultural hegemony and set their sights on other literary traditions. More or less at the same time, the independence of the former Spanish colonies in Latin America offered new possibilities for the expansion of British commercial interests overseas, a move usually accompanied by processes of cultural colonization. As a consequence, the status of Spanish literature was boosted to unprecedented heights. However, the process was complex on account of the deep ideological conflicts stemming from the diverse cultural identities that were taking shape in various European nations in the midst of a profound geopolitical crisis.
The fascination with Spain experienced by a section of the British cultural elites in the earlier phases of the Peninsular War turned into a profound disenchantment after the Vienna Conference (1814–15) because of the anti-liberal and reactionary turn of Spanish politics in its wake, with the exception of the Liberal Triennium (1820–3). Moreover, the negative view of Spain propagated through the Black Legend1 was fuelled in this period by the conflict around the Catholic Emancipation, a political process aimed at liberating British Catholics from most of the restrictions imposed upon them since the sixteenth-century. Kindled in 1800 by the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain, the ←9 | 10→conflict acquired momentum in the 1820s, arousing much controversy in both countries. It was finally settled by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. The first three decades of the nineteenth century were thus marked by strong anti-Catholic sentiment in Great Britain (Andrews; Kumar), that was also boosted by the centrality of Protestantism in the shaping of a national identity among the British (Colley). More broadly, the crisis of the Spanish Empire, the independence of the former American colonies, the struggle for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, and British interests overseas were also decisive in shaping the discourse on Spanish culture. The relations between Great Britain and Spain were then subject to a difficult balance of power that was reflected in the ideological filters and discursive strategies with which the British represented Spain. All these circumstances informed British authors’ perception of the Spanish cultural tradition, which ranged from fascination to outright rejection. A kind of impossible balance of these opposed views was also attempted by using very singular strategies of appropriation.
In the last couple of decades, several volumes have explored this phenomenon, beginning with Diego Saglia’s groundbreaking Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia, whose cultural approach is continued in several collected volumes: Joselyn Almeida’s Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, Ian Haywood’s and Saglia’s Spain and British Romanticism, Bernard Beatty’s and Alicia Laspra Rodríguez’s Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution: British Views on Spain 1814–1823 and Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez’s Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550–1850). Moreover, British interest in Spain as a literary topic has been further explored in Susan Valladares’s Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815 and in Agustín Coletes Blanco and Alicia Laspra Rodríguez’s Romántico país: poesía inglesa del Trienio. From the perspective of the history of the book, recent studies have also analysed the material presence of Spanish editions in London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Bas Martín and Taylor; Bas Martín), and Saglia’s European Literatures in Britain has studied the cultural translations and appropriations of foreign traditions through which British Romanticism acquired a cosmopolitan dimension. All these contributions have opened new paths and illuminated particular areas.
In addition, many studies have shown the interest of the British Romantic authors in Spanish literature, particularly that of the so-called Siglo de Oro [Golden Age]. From an early date, the reception of Pedro Calderón de la Barca was attested in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron (Madariaga; Gates; Saglia, Byron and Spain; Robinson; Insausti; Dumke; Moro Martín, “Calderón de la Barca,” “Calderón en Inglaterra;” ←10 | 11→Perojo Arronte, “Coleridge and Spanish Literature;” Almeida, “The Shelleys”). The critical interest in Lope de Vega by English Hispanists has been analysed in several studies. Comellas and Sánchez Jiménez focused their attention on John Talbot Dillon and Wiliam Hayley, and Robert Southey’s interest in Lope de Vega has been explored by Gonzalez (“Poetic Industry”) and Flores and González. A celebrated Spanish writer whose imprint upon English literature already had an established tradition by the early nineteenth century was Miguel de Cervantes, particularly his universal Don Quixote. Cervantes’s masterpiece was viewed in a new light in the Romantic period (Close) and its impact has been traced in the writings of S. T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (Sarmiento; Dudley; Garrido Ardila; Donahue; Moro Martín, “Everything,” “Extraños;” Perojo Arronte, “Samuel Taylor Coleridge”). Furthermore, the canon of British Hispanism has been extended to other classical authors such as Francisco de Quevedo, whose influence has been found in Lord Byron’s satirical works (Cochran), and Teresa of Ávila, who impacted Coleridge’s poetry and drama (Perojo Arronte, “Coleridge”). More widely, the Romantic development of national literary historiographies has attracted the attention of some British Hispanists to Spanish literary history, such as John Bowring (Comellas-Aguerrizábal, “La historia literaria”).
All these works reveal that the British Romantic authors faced a cultural and literary tradition to which they attributed a high degree of cultural capital but which they perceived as alien to both their native tradition and their national identity. The different ways used to both self-represent and represent the Other determined their strategies of appropriation and rewriting of foreign literary traditions. One of these strategies was the creation of a British canon of Spanish authors, for which the periodical press was instrumental.
Although the aforementioned studies on the reception of Spanish literature by individual British writers have been groundbreaking and enlightening, the repertoire of Spanish authors and works in British Romanticism can undoubtedly be expanded, and there remain unexplored relevant aspects that require scholarly attention. One of these is the role played by the periodical press during the Romantic period in the process of dissemination and canonization of Spanish literature. Even though the important role granted to literary reviews for the development of Romanticism in Great Britain has been solidly established (Behrendt; Butler; Christie; Demata; Hayden; Parker; Schoenfield; Wheatley), the impact of the periodical press as a tool for the shaping of public opinion about Spanish literature and culture in Great Britain is an area that was rather neglected until the last decade, following Vicente Llorens’s pioneering study Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en Inglaterra ←11 | 12→(1823–1834), which revealed the literary activities of Spanish political exiles in the British press. More recent criticism has followed suit. Blanco White’s criticism of Spanish literature in the British press for a wide Hispanic readership led Almeida (“Blanco White”) to propound the concept of an Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism, and Medina Calzada’s José Joaquín de Mora and Britain: Cultural Transfers and Transformations, and García Castañeda and Romero Ferrer’s collected edition, José Joaquín de Mora o la inconstancia: periodismo, política y literatura, offer interesting insights into the literary criticism published by the exile José Joaquín de Mora in British periodicals. More broadly, Saglia has analysed the presence of Spanish literature in The New Monthly Magazine (“Hispanism”) and more recently in the chapter “Periodicals and the Construction of European Literatures” of his European Literatures in Britain. Of great interest, too, are Durán López’s study on the reviews of Böhl von Faber’s Floresta de rimas castellanas in British magazines and Susan Valladares’ illuminating analysis of the clash between Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in the discourse on Spain developed by the British reviews during the Peninsular War. These studies shed light on the ideological and aesthetic implications of the reception of Spanish literature in Romantic Great Britain, but the literature on British magazines is still insufficient and the research offered in this volume is intended to take a step forward in the mapping of British Hispanism through the periodical press.
Details
- Pages
- 246
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631885505
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631885512
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783631886144
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631885499
- DOI
- 10.3726/b19994
- Open Access
- CC-BY
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (December)
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2022. 246 pp., 9 fig. col., 2 fig. b/w.
