Spain, Politics, and the British Romantic Imagination

This dissertation is about why Spain matters to British romanticism and the political importance romantic era writers as diverse as Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans, and Lord Byron deduced from Spain and Spanish affairs during the early part of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the implications of literary representations of Spain in the development of British political thought, this project more specifically considers the complex ways in which romantic imaginings of Spain attempted to reconcile the ideological conflicts that tended to polarize British culture and society in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Through its ability to be endlessly appropriated by wide-ranging groups across a diverse political spectrum' from radicals, republicans, and Whig reformers to reactionaries, royalists, and Tory establishmentarians' the Spanish imaginary provided a unique space for imagining the national reconciliation of what was increasingly seen as the antagonism between tradition and modernity. As a nation that promised to hold on to its traditions as it modernized and reformed itself, Spain after 1808, by virtue of its liberal developments during its War of Independence (1808-1814), presented the most compelling model of the modern liberal state, a specific mode of government designed to secure individual civil liberties while remaining true to its national character and past. While discussion of the particulars of the formation of the modern liberal state, an originally Spanish construction, remains beyond the scope of this study, the ideological reconciliation between tradition and modernity on which I am arguing it is based proved immensely important in bringing about a conceptual change in the way Britain viewed itself as a nation, and the world around it.