"Letters written during a short residence in Spain and Portugal" and Robert Southey’s later writtings

Resumen

This doctoral dissertation by compendium of publications critically reassesses Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal by looking at the inception of Robert Southey’s deeply ambiguous cultural cosmopolitanism—and how his first extended, published prose enterprise inaugurated a series of interests that were to permeate his later writings. Structured as a series of letters written as he travelled across the Iberian Peninsula between December 1795 and May 1796, Southey published the richly detailed account of his journey early in 1797. Letters engaged with the tradition of English travelogues, while borrowing traits from other genres such as the journal, translation, literary criticism, history, and the picturesque guidebook. On his way, Southey commented on every aspect of Spanish and Portuguese society, from local food and wine, bizarre customs, literature and theatregoing, to Iberian politics and religion. The four publications this dissertation is comprised of yield new insights into two crucial aspects of Southey’s writing career traditionally understudied by Romantic scholarship. Firstly, they explore how Southey championed the interconnectedness between tourism, walking, and landscape in his role as a successful travel writer. Secondly, they explore the inception and development of a line of work that would translate in Southey becoming one of the leading (Luso-)Hispanists in Georgian England. The methodology of research is governed, in the first place, by the resurgence in recent decades of scholarly interest in the genre of Romantic travel writing. In this respect, special emphasis has been given to how the late eighteenth century saw the transformation of walking from an unwelcome fact of life to an enriching mode of travel, and how this impacted travel writing. The theoretical model of the study further draws on the burgeoning research field of the connections between English and Iberian letters in Romantic England. On the whole, the analysis reveals a deeply nuanced composition and production process behind Letters which was to shape Southey’s attitude towards the business of literature in his later writings—offering a case study of the interplay between Southey’s Iberian travelogue and his semi-parodic Letters from England. This dissertation also attests to the development of Southey’s conflicted attitudes to Spanish literature in general, and Lope de Vega in particular, from the writing of Letters till his mid- to latecareer— showing how and why he moderated his earlier positions as he read further and built up a more complex network of understanding and affinity.