Cultural Mediation within and of English Literature around 1800

Travel Writing, Cultural Transfer and Performativity: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796)

Petra Broomans (Universität Groningen)

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is well known for her feminist pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Wollstonecraft was also an experienced traveller. Her travel account about her stay in Scandinavia, Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, was published in 1796.  Richard Holmes published an edited version of Mary Wollstonecraft’s travel letters in 1987, including an illuminating introduction and notes. My presentation begins by positioning Wollstonecraft’s letters within the genre of travel writing, then I will focus on three concepts that determine Wollstonecraft as a traveller-cultural transmitter: performativity, persona and cultural transfer. These three angles will be developed in the analysis of her Scandinavian letters, focusing on the way in which Wollstonecraft herself writes about travel writing and mediates ethnotypes of the countries she visited. In combining the cultural transfer of ethnotypes with persona (the self) and performativity (as writer, observer and scholar) in travel writing, the contribution aims to broaden the knowledge about how cultural transfer functions as a performative act in travel writing, as the Letters illustrate.

The Spanish Liberal Exile in London: José Joaquín de Mora and Anglo-Spanish Cultural Transfers in the 1820s

Sara Medina Calzada (Universidad de Valladolid)

The Spanish Liberal exile in London (1823-1833) is central in the examination of the cultural transfers between Britain and the Hispanic world in the Romantic era. These exiles played a part in introducing British literary models in Spain and Spanish America, thereby contributing to the development of Spanish Romanticism and, to some extent, counteracting French cultural dominance in the area. However, their role as intercultural mediators was not restricted to that. They were agents in a series of bidirectional cultural transfers since they were also active commentators and disseminators of Spanish literature in Britain, mostly through their contribution to British literary magazines. They did so at a time in which the interest in foreign literatures had intensified in Britain and, in particular, Spanish writers were gaining further visibility and recognition, partly as a result of the Romantic interpretations of Spanish literature that German critics had popularised.

To illustrate the nature and scope of the cultural transfers in which Spanish liberal exiles participated, this presentation centres on the writing and translation activities of one of them: José Joaquín de Mora (1783-1864). During his three-year exile in London (1823-1826), he became a close collaborator of the publisher Rudolph Ackermann, for whom he translated into Spanish two novels by Walter Scott, wrote a series of poems inspired by William Blake’s designs for Robert Blair’s The Grave and edited the Spanish version of the literary annual Forget Me Not to be distributed in Spanish America. Moreover, he published six articles on Spain and Spanish literature in the magazine European Review, thus participating in the transnational debates on Spanish culture and national identity that existed both at home and abroad. In order to understand his role as intercultural mediator, it is essential to understand Mora’s motivations when undertaking these projects and the decisions he took to accommodate texts and ideas to a different cultural area. Like other exiles, Mora not only promoted the circulation of information and cultural products between Britain and the Hispanic world but also did so in a direct way, that is to say, without the intervention of usual third-party intermediaries in Anglo-Spanish cultural transfers such as French and German literature and criticism.

The seminar will be held online via Zoom. All participants have to register first using this form.