Felicia Hemans, Spain and Cosmopolitan Liberalism

Abstract

In the summer of 1823 the Spanish constitutional monarchy, inaugurated in 1820 through the reinstatement of the 1812 Cadiz Constitution, was rapidly collapsing under the French military invasion decreed by the Holy Alliance. Against this background, in June 1823 Felicia Hemans published her volume The Siege of Valencia; A Dramatic Poem. The Last Constantine: with Other Poems. A combination of dramatic, narrative and lyrical verse, this book features episodes from the past of Spain, Greece and, to a lesser extent, Italy, thus engaging the explosive situation of Southern Europe in all its geopolitical complexity. Spain is the focus of this panorama thanks to The Siege of Valencia and the ‘Songs of the Cid’, as well as the epigraph to the volume taken from Miguel de Cervantes’s tragedy The Siege of Numancia. These Spanish materials relate intertextually and ideologically to the Italian questions raised by Hemans’s translation of the ‘Chorus’ from Alessandro Manzoni’s early Risorgimento history play The Count of Carmagnola. Finally, Greece features in the volume thanks to the narrative poem ‘The Last Constantine’ and a number of lyrics inspired by classical antiquity and the country’s current fight against the Ottomans. Examining this intricate formal and thematic structure, this chapter reassesses Hemans’s volume as a carefully orchestrated aesthetic and ideological object that offers a uniquely multifaceted commentary on the cultural and political centrality of Spain in contemporary Europe from a cosmopolitan and liberal perspective.