Hispanism
Hispanism is the study of the literature and culture of the Spanish-speaking world, principally that of Spain and Hispanic America. It may also entail studying Spanish language and cultural history in the United States and in other presently or formerly Spanish-speaking countries in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, such as Equatorial Guinea and the former Spanish East Indies.
A hispanist is a scholar specializing in Hispanicism. It was used in an article by Miguel de Unamuno in 1908 referring to 'el hispanista italiano Farinelli', and was discussed at length for the U.S. by Hispanist Richard L. Kagan of Johns Hopkins University. The work carried out by Hispanists includes translations of literature and they may specialize in certain genres, authors or historical periods of the Iberian Peninsula and Hispanic America, etc.
Origins
During the 16th century, Spain was a motor of innovation in Europe, given its links to new lands, subjects, literary sorts and personages, dances, and fashions. This hegemonic status, also advanced by commercial and economic interests, generated interest in learning the Spanish language, as Spain was the dominant political power and was the first to develop an overseas empire in post-Renaissance Europe. In order to respond to that interest, some Spanish writers developed a new focus on the Spanish language as subject matter. In 1492 Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramática castellana, the first published grammar of a modern European language. Juan de Valdés composed his for his Italian friends, who were eager to learn Castilian. And the lawyer Cristóbal de Villalón wrote in his that Castilian was spoken by Flemish, Italian, English, and French persons.For many years, especially between 1550 and 1670, European presses published a large number of Spanish grammars and dictionaries that linked Spanish to one or more other languages. Two of the oldest grammars were published anonymously in Louvain: and .
Among the more outstanding foreign authors of Spanish grammars were the Italians Giovanni Mario Alessandri and Giovanni Miranda ; the English Richard Percivale, John Minsheu and Lewis Owen ; the French Jean Saulnier and Jean Doujat ; the German Heinrich Doergangk ; and the Dutch Carolus Mulerius.
Dictionaries were composed by the Italian Girolamo Vittori, the Englishman John Torius and the Frenchmen Jacques Ledel, Jean Palet and François Huillery. The lexicographical contribution of the German Heinrich Hornkens and of the Franco-Spanish author Pere Lacavallería were also important to French Hispanism.
Others combined grammars and dictionaries. The works of the Englishman Richard Percivale, Frenchman César Oudin, Italians Lorenzo Franciosini and Arnaldo de la Porte and Austrian Nicholas Mez von Braidenbach were especially relevant. Franciosini and Oudin also translated Don Quixote. This list is far from complete and the grammars and dictionaries in general had a great number of versions, adaptations, reprintings and even translations. This is why it is not possible to exaggerate the great impact that the Spanish language had in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries.
In the 19th century, coinciding with the loss of the Spanish colonial empire and the birth of new Spanish American republics, Europe and the United States showed a renewed interest in Hispanic history, literature and culture of the declining great power and its now independent former colonies. Inside Spain, after the country lost definitely its empire in the Spanish defeat in 1898, calls for cultural regeneration and a new conception of identity based in language and humanities began to emerge.
During the Romantic period, the image of a Moorish and exotic medieval Spain, a picturesque country with a mixed cultural heritage, captured the imagination of many writers. This led many to become interested in Spanish literature, legends, and traditions. Travel books written at that time maintained and intensified that interest, and led to a more serious and scientific approach to the study of Spanish and Spanish American culture. This field did not have a word coined to name it until the early 20th century, when it ended up being called Hispanism.
Hispanism has traditionally been defined as the study of the Spanish and Spanish-American cultures, and particularly of their language by foreigners or people generally not educated in Spain. The Instituto Cervantes has promoted the study of Spanish and Hispanic culture around the world, similar to the way in which institutions such as the British Council, the Alliance Française or the Goethe Institute have done for their own countries.
Criticism
Hispanism as an organizing rubric has been criticized by scholars in Spain and in Spanish America. The term "attempts to appropriate Latin-American topics and subordinate them to a Spanish centre,” observes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. “The nomenclatures have a radial implication which both initiates and sanctions the flawed concept that all cultural materials under this heading emanate from a singular source: the Peninsula.” The rise of “Hispanism” as a term, notes Joan Ramon Resina, “in Spain as in Latin America, was accomplished for the purpose of political administration and obedience to Castilian rule through methods of domination that eventually led to independence and the birth of a constellation of republics.” He goes on to say that “it is incumbent on us to face up to the possibility that Hispanism no longer has a future in the university.” While Nicolas Shumway believes Hispanism “is an outmoded idea based on an essentialist, ideologically driven, and Spain-centric, notions,” Carlos Alonso maintains the field of Hispanism “must be rethought and exploded.”In the Philippines
In the Philippines, the Hispanists are a term that has become associated with white washing, colonial mentality and cultural cringe for the past years. In particular, it has surfaced in social media as a bias on Philippine history that regards the colonizers and conquistadors as heroes and "civilizers", and the Philippine national heroes like Andres Bonifacio and Lapulapu as the "villains".Issues and reactions had stirred on the so-called hispanista movement of Spanish restoration for their radicalism. Claims and historical narratives in the social media have included proposing to “replace” the current Filipino as the country's official language, alluding to the country's status as a former Spanish Empire colony. The anti-Tagalog bias and the demand to credit cultural achievements in the Filipino culture to the Spanish colonizers have resulted in backlash and a negative reputation for online supporters of these ideas in the Philippines.
World influence
Hispanic America
In the late 19th century Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó and Cuban José Martí were writers stressing the value of Spanish language and cultural heritage as part of the construction of an identity for the new Hispanic American independent nations.Great Britain and Ireland
The first Spanish book translated into English was the Celestina, as an adaptation in verse published in London between 1525 and 1530 by John Rastell. It includes only the first four acts and is based on the Italian version of Alfonso de Ordóñez; it is often referred to as an Interlude, and its original title is A New Comedy in English in Manner of an Interlude Right Elegant and Full of Craft of Rhetoric: Wherein is Shewed and Described as well the Beauty and Good Properties of Women, as Their Vices and Evil Conditions with a Moral Conclusion and Exhortation to Virtue.. The Scottish poet William Drummond translated Garcilaso de la Vega and Juan Boscán. The English knew the masterpieces of Castilian literature, from early translations of Amadís de Gaula by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo and the Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro. Sir Philip Sidney had read Los siete libros de la Diana by the Hispano-Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor, whose poetry influenced him greatly. John Bourchier translated Libro de Marco Aurelio by Antonio de Guevara. David Rowland translated Lazarillo de Tormes in 1586, which may have inspired the first English picaresque novel, The Unfortunate Traveller, by Thomas Nashe. By the end of the 16th century, the Celestina had been translated fully. Some of the translators of that time traveled or lived for some time in Spain, such as Lord Berners, Bartholomew Yong, Thomas Shelton, Leonard Digges and James Mabbe. William Cecil owned the largest Spanish library in the United Kingdom.Elizabethan theater also felt the powerful influence of the Spanish Golden Age. John Fletcher, a frequent collaborator of Shakespeare, borrowed from Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote for his Cardenio, possibly written in collaboration with Shakespeare, who is thought to have read Juan Luis Vives. Fletcher's frequent collaborator Francis Beaumont also imitated Don Quixote in the more well-known The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Fletcher also borrowed from other works by Cervantes, including Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda for his The Custom of the Country and La ilustre fregona for his beautiful young saleswoman. Cervantes also inspired Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, with his La gitanilla influencing their The Spanish Gipsy.
The first translation of Don Quixote into a foreign language was the English version by Thomas Shelton. And Don Quixote was imitated in the satirical poem Hudibras, composed by Samuel Butler. In addition, the works of some great Golden Age poets were translated into English by Richard Fanshawe, who died in Madrid. As early as 1738, a luxurious London edition of Don Quixote in Spanish was published, prepared by the Sephardic Cervantist Pedro Pineda, with an introduction by Gregorio Mayans and ornate engravings. Also in the 18th century two new translations of Don Quixote were published, one by the painter Charles Jervas and one by Tobias Smollett, a writer of picaresque novels. Smollet appears as an avid reader of Spanish narrative, and that influence is always present in his works. Meanwhile, the best work of the 17th-century writer Charlotte Lennox is The Female Quixote, which was inspired by Cervantes. Cervantes also was the inspiration for The Spiritual Quixote, by Richard Graves. Thwe first critical and annotated edition of Don Quixote was that of the English clergyman John Bowle. The novelists Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne also were familiar with the works of Cervantes.
Among the British travellers in Spain in the 18th century who left written testimony of their travels are John Durant Breval, Thomas James, Wyndham Beawes, James Harris, Richard Twiss, Francis Carter, William Dalrymple, Philip Thicknesse, Henry Swinburne, John Talbot Dillon, Alexander Jardine, Richard Croker, Richard Cumberland, Joseph Townsend, Arthur Young, William Beckford, John Macdonald, Robert Southey and .
Other English travel writers who straddled the 18th and 19th centuries include John Hookham Frere, Henry Richard Vassall-Fox, better known as Lord Holland, a great friend of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and Manuel José Quintana, and benefactor of José María Blanco White. Lord Holland visited Spain on numerous occasions and wrote his impressions about those trips. He also collected books and manuscripts and wrote a biography of Lope de Vega. His home was open to all Spaniards, but especially to the liberal émigrés who arrived in the London district of Somers Town in the 19th century, fleeing the absolutist repression of King Ferdinand VII and the religious and ideological dogmatism of the country. Many of them subsisted by translating or teaching their language to English people, most of whom were interested in conducting business with Spanish America, although others wished to learn about Spanish medieval literature, much in vogue among the Romantics. One of the émigrés, Antonio Alcalá Galiano, taught Spanish literature as a professor at the University of London in 1828 and published his notes. The publisher Rudolph Ackerman established a great business publishing Catecismos on different matters in Spanish, many of them written by Spanish émigrés, for the new Spanish-American republics. Matthew G. Lewis set some of his works in Spain. And the protagonist of Jane Austen's Abbey of Northanger is deranged by her excessive reading of Gothic novels, much as was Don Quixote with his books of chivalry.
Sir Walter Scott was an enthusiastic reader of Cervantes and tried his hand at translation. He dedicated his narrative poem The Vision of Roderick to Spain and its history. Thomas Rodd translated some Spanish folk ballads. Lord Byron also was greatly interested in Spain and was a reader of Don Quixote. He translated the ballad Ay de mi Alhama in part of his Childe Harold and Don Juan. Richard Trench translated Pedro Calderón de la Barca and was friends with some of the emigrated Spaniards, some of whom wrote in both English and Spanish, such as José María Blanco White and Telesforo de Trueba y Cossío, and many of whom, spread knowledge of the Spanish language and its literature. John Hookham Frere was a friend of the Duke of Rivas when the latter was in Malta, and Hookham translated some medieval and classical poetry into English. The brothers Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen and Benjamin B. Wiffen were both scholars of Spanish culture. The "Lake Poet" Robert Southey, translated Amadís de Gaula and Palmerín de Inglaterra into English, among others works. English novelists were strongly influenced by Cervantes. Especially so was Charles Dickens, who created a quixotic pair in Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller of Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. John Ormsby translated the Cantar de Mio Cid and Don Quixote. Percy Bysshe Shelley left traces of his devotion to Calderón de la Barca in his work. The polyglot John Bowring traveled to Spain in 1819 and published the observations of his trip. Other accounts of travel in Spain include those of Richard Ford, whose Handbook for Travellers in Spain was republished in many editions, and George Borrow, author of the travelogue The Bible in Spain, which was translated into Castilian by Manuel Azaña, the poet and translator Edward Fitzgerald, and the literary historian James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, who was mentor to a whole British generation of Spanish scholars such as Edgar Allison Peers and Alexander A. Parker. Other outstanding Hispanists include the following:
- Francis William Pierce, Irish student of the epic poetry of the Golden Age;
- John Brande Trend, a historian of Spanish music;
- Edward Meryon Wilson, who translated the Soledades of Luis de Góngora ;
- Norman David Shergold, student of the Spanish auto sacramental;
- John E. Varey, who documented the evolution of the paratheatrical forms in the Golden Age;
William James Entwistle;
Peter Edward Russell;
Nigel Glendinning;
Brian Dutton;
Gerald Brenan;
John H. Elliott;
Raymond Carr;
Henry Kamen;
John H. R. Polt;
Hugh Thomas;
Colin Smith;
Edward C. Riley;
Keith Whinnom;
Paul Preston;
Alan Deyermond;
Ian Michael; and
Ian Gibson.
The was founded in 1955 by a group of university professors at St. Andrews, and since then it has held congresses annually. The AHGBI played a decisive role in the creation of the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, whose first congress was held at Oxford in 1962.