RT book part
T1 Aben Humeya and the Journey of Historical MythsOn Telesforo de Trueba’s The Romance of History: Spain (1830) and Its Spanish Translation (1840)
A1 Muñoz Sempere, Daniel
A2 Filología
AB Spanish Romanticism negotiated the legacy of Al-Andalus as part of a wider process of Liberal nation building. Inspired by recent scholarship on the ways in which the Andalusian Moorish past was incorporated into the emerging national narrative, I study the historical legends by the Spanish émigré in London Telésforo de Trueba y Cossio, with a focus on how these legends were translated into Spanish. Trueba’s fictionalized account of the 1568 Rebellion of the Alpujarras in the story “The Mountain King”—focused on the Moorish leader Aben Humeya, and primarily drawn from sixteenth and seventeenth—century sources- exemplifies the way in which the coexistence of Islam and Christianity in Spain was portrayed by Liberals as a struggle that preceded the rise of a unified, modern, Christian nation. Moreover, the 1840 translation of the story into Spanish shows a clear attempt to erase the ambiguities found in the original in respect to the legitimacy of the rebellion and the claims of the moriscos to the Andalusian lands they inhabited. The process by which the original early-modern sources were rewritten as Romantic stories for the British -and, later, Spanish- nineteenth-century literary market took place in a transnational context mediated by emigrés such as José María Blanco White, Joaquín de Mora or Trueba himself. Our contention is that the spatial and temporal journey undertook by historical myths such as that of Aben Humeya can reveal some of the fault lines in the encounter between the European Romantic image of Spain and an incipient Spanish Liberal nationalism.
PB Brill
SN 978-90-04-51533-8
YR 2022
FD 2022
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34324
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34324
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 22-sep-2026