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Abstract

Spanish Romanticism negotiated the legacy of Al-Andalus as part of a wider process of Liberal nation building. Inspired by recent scholarship on the ways in which the Andalusian Moorish past was incorporated into the emerging national narrative, I study the historical legends by the Spanish émigré in London Telésforo de Trueba y Cossio, with a focus on how these legends were translated into Spanish. Trueba’s fictionalized account of the 1568 Rebellion of the Alpujarras in the story “The Mountain King”—focused on the Moorish leader Aben Humeya, and primarily drawn from sixteenth and seventeenth—century sources- exemplifies the way in which the coexistence of Islam and Christianity in Spain was portrayed by Liberals as a struggle that preceded the rise of a unified, modern, Christian nation. Moreover, the 1840 translation of the story into Spanish shows a clear attempt to erase the ambiguities found in the original in respect to the legitimacy of the rebellion and the claims of the moriscos to the Andalusian lands they inhabited. The process by which the original early-modern sources were rewritten as Romantic stories for the British -and, later, Spanish- nineteenth-century literary market took place in a transnational context mediated by emigrés such as José María Blanco White, Joaquín de Mora or Trueba himself. Our contention is that the spatial and temporal journey undertook by historical myths such as that of Aben Humeya can reveal some of the fault lines in the encounter between the European Romantic image of Spain and an incipient Spanish Liberal nationalism.

Open Access
In: Otherness and National Identity in 19th-Century Spanish Literature
Which were the mechanisms by which certain groups were positioned at the margins of national narratives during the nineteenth century, either via their exclusion from these narratives of through their incorporation into them as ‘others’? By engaging with shifting ideas of exclusion and difference, the authors in this book reflect upon the paradoxical centrality of the subaltern at a time when literature was deployed as a tool for nation building. The lasting presence of the Jewish and Moorish legacy, the portrayal of gypsy characters, or the changing notions of femininity in public discourse exemplify the ways in which images of marginal ‘types’ played a central role in the configuration of the very idea of Spanishness.

¿Cuáles fueron los mecanismos mediante los que ciertos grupos fueron relegados a los márgenes del relato nacional durante el siglo XIX, bien a través de su exclusión de dichos relatos, bien a través de su incorporación a ellos como "otros"? A través del análisis de las ideas de exclusión y diferencia, los autores de este libro reflexionan sobre la paradójica centralidad de lo marginal en una época en la que la literatura fue una herramienta fundamental para la construcción de la nación. La pervivencia del legado judío y morisco, la representación de personajes gitanos o las distintas nociones de feminidad presentes en el discurso público ejemplifican las formas en que las imágenes de "tipos" marginales desempeñaron un papel central en la configuración de la idea de españolidad.