Present Status of Studies in North American Hispanism

Abstract

After presenting abundant bibliography of foreign influences on North American literature, the authors of the Literary History of the United States observe: No survey has yet been made of the contribution in America.' Considering the effort expended on even minor literary influences and the many accounts of Anglo-French, Anglo-German, and Franco-German relations, this neglect is surprising. It is even more so in view of the fact that since early in the century distinguished British scholars have not hesitated to acknowledge their own debt to Spain. A great step toward remedying such neglect was recently taken by the late Stanley T. Williams. His The Background of American Literature (New Haven, 1955) focuses attention on North American artistic concern with things Spanish, a concern which, when combined with England's similar one, might establish the validity of Anglo-Hispanic field of comparative studies. In this century several attempts have been made to introduce such study, spanning the uncharted and immense scope of almost four centuries and of stimuli from three sources: the Peninsula, America, and the North American West. The approaches to the problem include, first of all, the surveys-compendiums of varied sources of inspiration manifest in as many periods, genres, and works as the compiler can reasonably encompass. Some investigation has also been carried on in more concentrated areas. The techniques employed in these more modest efforts involve analyses of the several influences on a single author, on a genre, and on individual work; and the influence of one author on various North Americans, on individual writer, and on a single book. With respect to the general accounts, culminating in Williams' work, perhaps the most stimulating of all references to the Hispanic interests of North American writers have been those dispersed throughout the five volumes of Van Wyck Brooks's series Makers and Finders: a History of the Writer in America, 18001915. Although casual and unpursued, these comments beckon temptingly along innumerable untrod paths. Indeed, as one reviewer points out, Williams' comprehensive treatment seems an elaboration of Brooks' lucid discussion.2 The actual prototype of such surveys is, however, Miguel Romera-Navarro's El Hispanismo en Norte-America (Madrid, 1917). This initial attempt deals principally with the nineteenth-century historians of Spain and refuters of the black legend, with the well-known scholars in the United States and with the most widely publicized contingent of Hispanophiles: Washington Irving, William Hickling Prescott, George Ticknor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and James Russell Lowell-those on whom Williams, adding Francis Bret Harte and William Dean Howells, also lavishes the most attention, in the form of separate chapters referred to as Spanish biographies. Another outstanding account of a general nature is the detailed article Hispanismo, Enciclopedia universal ilustrada, Vol. xxvii (1925), which acknowledges the United States as the foreign leader in the realm of