Spanish America and British romanticism, 1777-1826 : rewriting conquest /
Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as South American mad." As Spain's hold on its colonies progressively weakened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thousands of British scientists, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and settlers rushed...
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| Online Access: |
Full text (MCPHS users only) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Edinburgh :
Edinburgh University Press,
2010
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| Series: | Edinburgh studies in transatlantic literatures.
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| Subjects: | |
| Local Note: | ProQuest Ebook Central |
| Summary: | Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as South American mad." As Spain's hold on its colonies progressively weakened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thousands of British scientists, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and settlers rushed to take advantage of the enticing opportunities Spanish America offered. Britain's fascination with the region displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, political tracts, news reportage, travel narratives, and stock market quotations. Creole patriots such as Francisco de Miranda and AndrÃ♭s Bello gathered in London to solicit aid for their revolutions while ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain's colonies. Through critical reconsiderations of both canonical and lesser-known Romantic texts, from Helen Maria Williams's Peru to Samuel Rogers's The Voyage of Columbus and Byron's The Age of Bronze, Heinowitz reveals the untold story of Romantic-era Britain's Spanish American obsession. Although historians have traditionally characterized Britain's relationship with Spanish America as commercial rather than colonial, this book explores the significant rhetorical overlap between formal and informal strategies of rule. In the absence of a coherent imperial policy regarding Spain's colonies, Britain struggled to justify its actions by means of the problematic assertion that British primacy was authorized by a political, cultural, ethical, and even historical identification with the peoples of Spanish America. By examining the ways in which this discourse of British-Spanish American similitude was deployed and increasingly strained throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Heinowitz demonstrates that British writing about Spanish America redefines the anxieties, ambivalences, and contradictions that characterize Romantic Imperialism. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (ix, 254 pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 218-236) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780748641611 0748641610 0748651705 9780748651702 1282620401 9781282620407 9786612620409 6612620404 |
| Language: | English. |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Print version record. |
