“A more genuine and healthy tone in SpanishLiterature” Fernán Caballero in Britain

Abstract

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.