'Dear Old Romantic Spain': Washington Irving Imagines Andalucía
Abstract
Of all the English and American Romantic writers on Andalucía and the Alhambra, Washington Irving remains most closely associated with this region in the twenty-first century. This essay seeks to explain his enduring popularity from two interrelated perspectives: Irving's strategies for integrating his personae into tales and legends about Andalucía, and his meditations on how the past is understood and represented. I argue that in The Alhambra, Irving uses his persona Geoffrey Crayon to develop a tension between naïve indulgence in the romanticization of a place and ironic reflection on the consequences of this indulgence. Crayon's comprehension and representation of Andalucía is mediated through three important texts. In using Don Quixote as a guide to his travels, Crayon demonstrates how our experiences of unknown places are necessarily mediated through our narrative knowledge. By invoking Irving's previous work on Andalucía, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, Crayon reminds his reader of the partiality of all versions of the past. Finally, by absorbing and retransmitting local legends told by the inhabitants of the Alhambra, Crayon manages both to explore the workings of cultural memory and to inscribe Irving's texts into the cultural memory of Andalucía.
Publication Title
Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Recommended Citation
Scraba, J. (2010). 'Dear Old Romantic Spain': Washington Irving Imagines Andalucía. Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 136, 275-295. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789042030336_013
