British Periodicals and Spanish Literature

With the main goal of contributing to a wider understanding of the presence
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.


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 . 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 Legend 1 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 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 Insausti; Dumke; Moro Martín, "Calderón de la Barca, " "Calderón en Inglaterra;" 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 (1823)(1824)(1825)(1826)(1827)(1828)(1829)(1830)(1831)(1832)(1833)(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. This was a time in which critical activity underwent a revolution in Great Britain. Founded in 1802, The Edinburgh Review established the pattern for a new highbrow cultural journalism with a liberal bent. This journal was soon imitated by ideological counterparts The Quarterly Review (founded in 1809) and Blackwood's Magazine (founded in 1817). As a consequence, a dialogue was established among them, often determined by European political events. Other major journals which featured Spanish matters were The Examiner, a weekly founded by the brothers John and Leigh Hunt in 1808 and edited until 1821 by the latter, a reputed author and critic well known for his radicalism; the New Monthly Magazine (1814); the Westminster Review (1824); and the London Review (1829). In Marilyn Butler's words, journals were "culture's medium" (121) and key to the perception of books by a reading public that was increasingly becoming a mass audience. On top of that, literary journalism was closely related to historical events, and the ideological agendas of the periodical press were obviously linked to partisan positions in political controversies. This circumstance might be reflected in the selection of works and authors, and in the choice of writers for the reviews. The value granted (or denied) to foreign literatures in these publications must therefore be considered from the perspective of both literary and cultural studies since, as previously discussed, this was a critical time in European history. The attention to or rejection of a specific literary tradition usually implied an ideological bias regarding the changing and unstable geopolitics of the time. The political agendas of the publications and the specific historical background of their reviews are key issues for the interpretation of their production. Hence, the analysis of the reviews of Spanish literature published in these journals sheds light on the practice of British Romantic writers regarding Spanish literature in their own works and, in more general terms, on the reception of Spanish culture in Great Britain. This line of research spreads out from a literary approach to also explore ideological and identity issues that will contribute to a better understanding of the complex interrelations between Great Britain and Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Spanish books were accessible, though with certain difficulties in the case of highly specialized ones, and circulated in Great Britain during the Romantic era. The formidable task of cataloguing the editions and translations of Spanish works that were available to English readers in the first half of the nineteenth century -a task inevitably doomed to remain incomplete -was first attempted by José Alberich in his Nonetheless, these records cover but a small portion of the Spanish literary works present on British soil. The list could be greatly enlarged with information drawn from the catalogues of circulating libraries, booksellers, antiquarians, and private libraries, all of which are important channels for the import and circulation of foreign books. As Bas Martín notes, the sales and auctions of books that were so much in vogue in England in the Romantic era were the sites of some of the most important transactions. In fact, many private libraries were created thanks to the rise of Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses. In addition, bookshops and the circulating libraries often associated with them were the main channels for the distribution of literary texts. At the turn of the nineteenth century, foreign books could be obtained in London, a "center of cultural power based, among other things, on the collection, diffusion, and discussion (and, albeit to a lesser degree, production) of foreign language works" (Saglia,"Foreign Books" 52). While most of the foreign books sold were French (the most popular) and Italian, Spanish works could be found in the bookshops owned by William Earle, Michael Heavisides, Rudolf Ackermann, and the Valencian liberal exile Vicente Salvá y Pérez, who opened his Spanish and Classic Library in Regent Street in 1824. Spanish books were pursued by some bibliophile collectors such as Richard Heber, Henry George Bhon, Richard Ford, or Obadiah Rich (Bas Martín and Barry 11), who treasured them in their private libraries. A thorough scrutiny of the selling catalogues issued by auctioneers, relevant London booksellers, and collectors would thus, in all likelihood, reveal a wider presence of Spanish letters in Romantic Great Britain than that pictured by Alberich and Pane.
The routes taken by Spanish literary commodities on their way to Great Britain and the intermediary agents who assisted their reception were various. Travellers such as Richard Twiss, Edward Clarke, John Talbot Dillon, Robert Southey, and William Jacob not only provided English readers with accounts of Spanish literature in the pages of their travelogues, they also brought home a good number of Spanish publications acquired during their sojourns in the Iberian Peninsula. Likewise, diplomats such as John Hookham Frere, Wyndham Beawes, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, or Alexander Jardine, also got hold of certain volumes during their residences in Spain which ended up on British shelves. Finally, editors such as John Gibson Lockhart and John Rutter Chorley also played a noteworthy role as intermediaries providing texts and references to British authors.
Given that books from Spain and in Spanish were frequently acquired through personal contacts, literary and cultural networks were central to the diffusion of Spanish literature. An interesting case is the Club Hispanus, a "political forum organised along the lines of a Gentlemen's Club, " whose list of Spanish members included the writer Fernández de Moratín (Bas Martín 145). 2 Holland House stands out among literary circles for its instrumental role in the dissemination of Spanish literature. It was the most outstanding centre of cultural and political activity related to Spain in London, where the Hispanist Henry Richard Vassal Fox, Third Lord Holland, possessed -and shared with his personal circle -a private collection that included numerous, and often rare, Spanish volumes. Lord Holland was a "man of many friendships" (Sanders 15,97), among them one can list some of the major Romantic poets (Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, among others), to whom he granted access to his impressive library, while denying it to others such as Mary Shelley. Holland also welcomed into his circle the Spanish exiles, who "occupied an intermediate position that made them the embodiments of the intercultural relations between the two countries and cultures" (Saglia and Haywood 8). This complex network of the book trade, collections, auctions, and personal connections favoured the circulation of Spanish books that were noticed, advertised, and reviewed in the periodical press, which emerges as a key element in this intricate mechanism of cultural and literary exchange during the Romantic period.
This volume mainly features work resulting from the research project "Hispanic Literature in the British Romantic Periodical Press (1802-32): Appropriating and Rewriting the Canon. " With the main goal of contributing to a wider understanding of the presence of Spanish literature and culture in British Romanticism, the chapters gathered here focus on the instrumental role played by the British periodical press in Anglo-Hispanic literary and cultural exchange in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The volume is divided into four different but complementary sections. The three chapters in Part 1, "Cultural Mediators, " examine the main agents of dissemination, while the two chapters in Part 2, "Constructing the Canon, " dive into the discursive strategies for Spanish literature's canonization in the British press during the Romantic period. Part 3, "Appropriating Classical Authors, " comprises three chapters devoted more specifically to an analysis of the reception of three major Golden Age authors: Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Miguel de Cervantes. Finally, Part 4, "Appropriating Contemporary Authors, " gathers three chapters on critical reactions to three contemporary authors published in British periodicals: Tomás de Iriarte, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa and Fernán Caballero.
Part 1 opens with three chapters addressing the influential role of literary critics as cultural mediators. Chapter 1, by María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia, delves into the role of the literary historian and critic Ángel Anaya in the rewriting of the Spanish canon for English audiences. Lorenzo-Modia explores this enigmatic figure of Spanish letters whose main works, the four-volume anthology El teatro español (1817-21) and An Essay on Spanish Literature (1818), were published in London and widely reviewed by British and Irish periodicals. They were also known in America, as Lorenzo-Modia attests. She also highlights the role of their respective publishers -George Smallfield, and Boosey and Sons -as cultural mediators through their production of Spanish books. The chapter also includes a copy and transcription of Anaya's will. In Chapter 2, Sara Medina Calzada examines the reviews of Spanish literary works that the Spanish liberals exiled in London published in British periodicals between 1823 and 1834, crucial in the dissemination of Spanish literature. Their attempt to reinterpret the history of Spanish literature and, more generally, Spanish history and national identity from their position as liberals and exiles was a singular one. They also had to contend with the clash between their Neoclassical background and the appeal of English Romanticism, which is reflected in their writings and made their contributions on Spanish literature illuminating critical pieces which offered alternative views to those prevailing among British Romantic critics. In turn, Begoña Lasa-Álvarez underlines in Chapter 3 the role of literary advertisers as tastemakers, exploring the reviews of and advertisements for Spanish books of a variety of genres published in The Literary Gazette during the 1830s. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu's notion of cultural mediators and Michele Espagne and Matthias Midelle's concept of cultural transfer, Lasa-Álvarez analyses how editors mediated and attracted readers' attention to books on Spanish matters and translations by drawing on the clichés established in the two previous decades about Spanish patriotism and the idealization of Spain as a Romantic land.
In Part 2, Chapters 4 and 5, by María Eugenia Perojo Arronte and Diego Saglia, respectively, show that the literary reviews were inextricable from current issues and concerns. They both explore the literary, political and historical contexts and analyse strategies of canonization. In her chapter, Perojo Arronte compares the discursive strategies through which, in their criticism of ballads, nineteenth-century Spanish and British critics offered their views of the Spanish political nation on account of their respective geopolitical stances and ideologies. Underlying their sometimes opposed discourses is the role granted or denied to Spain in the new Concert of Nations. Saglia is concerned with John Gibson Lockhart's "Horae Hispanicae, " a series of essays on Spanish literature published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the 1820s. Saglia compares the Spanish series with the previous German one ("Horae Hispanicae"), noting that where the latter is dedicated mostly to contemporary literature, the former focuses on earlier periods (the Middle Ages and early Renaissance) with a heavily ideological bias in line with Friedrich Schlegel's Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (1815), which Lockhart had in fact translated in 1818. Saglia contends that this British writer contributed to establishing Spanish literature within the new post-Waterloo European cultural and ideological system. Part 3, devoted to the British critical reception and the influence of individual Golden Age authors during the Romantic period, opens with Chapter 6, by Cristina Flores Moreno, on the presence of Lope de Vega in some of the major British periodicals. As the critical appraisal of Lope is generally filtered through a net of cultural, political and religious prejudices beyond the literary quality of the work under scrutiny, from the analysis of the reviews emerges not only an overview of Lope's afterlife in Romantic England but also of the intricacies of Anglo-Spanish cultural exchange during that period, and the construction of different views of Spanishness. Calderón de la Barca is the other Siglo de Oro author whose reception in the British press is explored in this volume. Davinia Rodríguez-Ortega offers in Chapter 7 an analysis of Mary Margaret Busk's translations of three of Calderón de la Barca's comedies, published in 1825-6 in Blackwood's Magazine. The study of the fragments translated, of those passages that are summarized and the introduction that precedes the translations illustrates Busk's view of Spanish Golden Age drama, a viewpoint that reveals itself to be conditioned by her strong belief in British superiority. The final two chapters of this part deal with the reception of Don Quixote in Romantic Britain. Chapter 8, by Alfredo Moro Martín, traces Cervantean echoes in Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816). Moro Martín argues that the archetype of the Quixotic pedant, shaped by some of the most notable eighteenth-century English novelists, finds a clear echo in the figure of Jonathan Oldbuck, the protagonist of Scott's novel. Moro Martín traces in detail not only the Quixotic features of the erudite archetype in Scott's character, but more generally the prevalence of Cervantes's model in the novel, a sign of its hold over the British narrative tradition over the centuries. Finally, Fernando and Beatriz González Moreno discuss the new Romantic conception of Cervantes's masterpiece through an analysis of the reception of illustrated editions of Don Quixote in Romantic England, such as that of Harrison and Co. (1782), with illustrations by Thomas Stothard, or, more significantly, T. Cadell and W. Davies (1818), with designs by Robert Smirke, among others, which put forward aesthetic novelties and underlined a new Romantic reading of the novel. As the González Morenos contend, drawing on the eighteenthcentury caricatural tradition of William Hogarth, the parodic potential created by Cervantes was exploited to satirize other genres and literary types beyond chivalric books. One clear instance is William Combe's The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. A Poem (1809 and 1812), where the travel book aspects of Cervantes's novel are used to parody the picturesque traveller and more widely Romantic travel literature.
While recent scholarship has mainly focused on the reception of classic Spanish writers, proving the dedicated interest of British Romantic authors in medieval and early modern Spanish literature, the reception of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Spanish authors and works in British Romanticism has received scant attention. The three chapters in the closing section of the volume seek to fill this gap. Hence, in Chapter 10, Leticia Villamediana González explores the reception of the Spanish Enlightenment author Tomás de Iriarte and multiple reviews and translations of his works, with particular attention to his collection Fábulas literarias (1782), which was partially translated by Robert Southey in his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797) and also in several periodicals, where the English author uses various strategies to achieve a cultural adaptation of the work. The interest that Iriarte's book aroused is further illustrated by John Belfour's translation in 1804 and its London edition by the Hispanist Agustín Luis Josse in 1809. The multiple reviews in the periodical press note the modernity of Iriarte's fables but also point to the international rivalry among competing literatures. Villamediana González also proves the pedagogical value of Iriarte's text for learners of Spanish, which was acquiring importance as a commercial language among the British. Chapter 11, by Fernando Durán López, explores the reception of Francisco Martínez de la Rosa's Obras literarias, published in Paris in 1827-8. This esteemed Spanish author and politician had a rather poor reception in the British periodical press. Durán López analyses the reviews that soon appeared in The Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany and The Foreign Quarterly Review (1829), showing the disregard and lack of appreciation generally displayed in both. In 1835, José María Blanco White's proposal to review Martínez de la Rosa's work for the London Review (1835) was accepted by its editor, John Stuart Mill, probably seeking to exploit Martínez de la Rosa's fame as Prime Minister of Spain at the time. Durán López argues that Blanco White's criticism, despite its apparently objective tone, is rather negatively biased for aesthetic and ideological reasons: Martínez de la Rosa's Neoclassicism was much too outdated by the time of this review and his role as Prime Minister encapsulated an image of Spain that diverged significantly from Blanco White's European outlook. Finally, in Chapter 12, Daniel Muñoz Sempere deals with the reception of Fernán Caballero in early Victorian Britain, with particular attention to her novel La Gaviota (1849). The works of Caballero attracted the attention of British reviewers as examples of Spanish modern literature. However, Muñoz Sempere argues that clear echoes of earlier Romantic idealized views of Andalusia can be perceived in their assessment and criticism, which brings back the dichotomy between past and present upon which the British built their Spanish imaginary, one more instance of how the past veils the present in the process of cultural transfer and reception.
All the chapters in this volume bear witness to the contrasting and varied perception of everything Spanish, and different strategies of exploration, appropriation and rewriting of its cultural and literary tradition. They all reveal an intricate web of cultural, political and religious factors colouring the discourse of British Romantic literary critics and authors on Spanish cultural capital.