Anglomanía: la imagen de Inglaterra en la prensa española del siglo XVIII by Leticia Villamediana González

Abstract

 Reviews of the twentieth novella, Estragos que causa el vicio. Lisis, the protagonist of the overarching narrative and host of an entertaining soiree, finally reveals that she has no intention of marrying don Diego despite the attendees’ expectation that the evening would culminate in their nuptial celebrations. As with the majority of Zayas’s phrasing, ‘no por mí, que no me toca, pues me conocéis por lo escrito, más no por la vista’ lends itself to multiple readings. ese words form Lisis’s rationale for rejecting don Diego’s courtship and her decision to enter a convent. One interpretation is that the issue with men’s perpetual mistreatment of women is not a concern that affects Lisis any longer, as this dialogue precedes her decision to reside in a convent, a female-only space in which men’s actions indeed cannot touch her. Alternatively, the quotation could highlight Lisis’s existence as a fictional character. Irrespective of whether we accept Navarro Durán’s central premiss or not, there are clear advantages to drawing connections between the output of Castillo Sol órzano and Zayas given that the complex dialogues between Golden Age authors oen resulted in shared preoccupations and variations on themes such as disillusionment . In the fih chapter ‘Puentes entre las novelas’, Navarro Durán highlights how cross-dressing and the narrative conceit of the invisible mistress are tropes for Zayas and Castillo Solórzano alike (p. ). Again, however, a non sequitur is at play. e prodigious playwright Lope de Vega had introduced the invisible mistress as an expression of Baroque disillusion and source of satire. Hence, the use of plots involving this figure is undoubtedly a ‘puente’ that links Castillo Solórzano’s and Zayas’s writing, but this proves little beyond the interconnections between the works of Golden Age authors. U  L H O’K Anglomanía: la imagen de Inglaterra en la prensa española del siglo XVIII. By L V G. Woodbridge: Támesis. .  pp.£. ISBN ––––. English matters were hardly a staple of the early eighteenth-century Spanish press. By  the trend had drastically changed. How and why did this happen? Leticia Villamediana González responds to this question in a thoroughly researched and captivatingly argued book. e wealth of literary and press materials consulted allows her to unearth reasons why readers and writers developed an ‘Anglomanía’, consisting of Anglophobia and Anglophilia alike. English essays, novels, plays, and periodicals were translated into Castilian and avidly read in Spain. Celebrated authors and scientists (e.g. Leandro Fernández de Moratín and José Mendoza y Ríos) visited and lived in London. ey later published memoirs and detailed accounts informing Spanish readers about novelties witnessed in the English capital. Busy presses, outspoken criticism of the government, and the role of Parliament in shaping public life in England ranked high in their list of interests. ese publications reflected (on) the ambivalent feelings they experienced at a time when MLR, .,   the Spanish press was less diverse or developed than its counterparts in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England itself. e ongoing process of civilization, to appropriate Norbert Elias’s descriptive term for the late early modern period, was thus moulded and defined in conversation and competition among European powers. Or, as Villamediana chooses to label these interactions, ‘civilized’ practices, ideas, and artefacts were interchanged via the ‘cultural transfers’ between Spain and England. Political, dynastic, and geographic factors accounted for the domineering French influence on Spanish Enlightenment circles for most of the s. However, as shown in Chapter , the impact of the emerging British political economy increasingly demanded the attention of Spanish readers. As an editor and writer, the Dutch-born Juan Enrique de Graef was at the vanguard of this new turn with his publication of the Discursos Mercuriales económico-políticos in the early s. Graef, as well as Francisco Mariano Nifo some years later in La estafeta de Londres, echoed the English criticism of the tight Spanish monopoly of trade with the American territories. Having read the works of John Locke and David Hume, Graef denounced the excessive influence lawyers and clergymen held over Spain’s...