%0 Journal Article 
%A Muñoz Sempere, Daniel
%T “A more genuine and healthy tone in SpanishLiterature” Fernán Caballero in Britain
%D 2022
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34358
%X British Romantic interest in Spanish literature was often underpinned by the idea
that the literary genius of Spain was a casualty of its social and political decay. The revival
of the romancero, Cervantes and Golden Age drama in British criticism during the first
half of the nineteenth century suggests a stark contrast between a glorious chivalric past
and a present marked by economic decline and literary stagnation. Reviews of contempo-
rary Spanish literature were, therefore, less prevalent than those of translations, editions
and anthologies of medieval and early modern classics. Although towards the middle of
the century some British magazines featured appraisals of contemporary Romantic writers
such as Larra or the Duke of Rivas, the turning point in the reception of nineteenth-century
Spanish literature was the publication of Fernán Caballero’s La Gaviota (1849) – and its
English translation of 1867 – and her collection of Andalusian folk tales (1859). The works
of Caballero were reviewed, excerpted and commented on in some of the main periodicals
of the age, often as specimens of a modern Andalusian genius that built on well-known
Romantic ideas about the peninsular south and its folklore. This chapter interrogates the
reasons for Caballero’s popularity in mid-nineteenth- century Britain, and the ways in
which her reception was influenced by the dichotomies between past and present, and
between north and south, that informed British literary approaches to Spain.
%~ Universidad de Cádiz