RT book part
T1 “A more genuine and healthy tone in SpanishLiterature” Fernán Caballero in Britain
A1 Muñoz Sempere, Daniel
A2 Filología
AB British Romantic interest in Spanish literature was often underpinned by the ideathat the literary genius of Spain was a casualty of its social and political decay. The revivalof the romancero, Cervantes and Golden Age drama in British criticism during the firsthalf of the nineteenth century suggests a stark contrast between a glorious chivalric pastand a present marked by economic decline and literary stagnation. Reviews of contempo-rary Spanish literature were, therefore, less prevalent than those of translations, editionsand anthologies of medieval and early modern classics. Although towards the middle ofthe century some British magazines featured appraisals of contemporary Romantic writerssuch as Larra or the Duke of Rivas, the turning point in the reception of nineteenth-centurySpanish literature was the publication of Fernán Caballero’s La Gaviota (1849) – and itsEnglish translation of 1867 – and her collection of Andalusian folk tales (1859). The worksof Caballero were reviewed, excerpted and commented on in some of the main periodicalsof the age, often as specimens of a modern Andalusian genius that built on well-knownRomantic ideas about the peninsular south and its folklore. This chapter interrogates thereasons for Caballero’s popularity in mid-nineteenth- century Britain, and the ways inwhich her reception was influenced by the dichotomies between past and present, andbetween north and south, that informed British literary approaches to Spain.
PB Peter Lang
SN 978-3-631-88550-5
YR 2022
FD 2022
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34358
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34358
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 22-sep-2026