Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy: Tudor and Stuart Black Legends

Description

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Were faeries and Amazons hiding in Guiana, and where was the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England's fanatical consumption of these tales of love and arms as reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature, and how these circumstances primed the success of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.

Victoria Munoz is a scholar of medieval and early modern literature and culture. Her specialties include Anglo-Spanish relations during the Renaissance, early modern English and Spanish literatures, early modern religious history and its intersection with European and colonial politics.

"Munoz is a must-read for all scholars of Anglo-Spanish literature and history: her analysis of the relationships between language and genre, empire and authorship is nothing short of superb." - Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon, Honorary Faculty Research Fellow, University of Oxford "Munoz reveals the Spanish traits in those English texts that aspired to build up an imperial national identity using literary works produced in enemy territory for completely different reasons. In doing so, she also explores the links between those procedures and the rising Black Legend against Spain generated in early modern England" - Leticia Alvarez Recio Universidad de Sevilla, Spain.