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Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in Aztec México? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Were faeries and Amazons hiding in Guiana, and where was the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of these tales of love and arms as reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature, and how these circumstances primed the success of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.
“Muñoz reveals the Spanish traits in those English texts that aspired to build up an imperial national identity using literary works produced in enemy territory for completely different reasons. In doing so, she also explores the links between those procedures and the rising Black Legend against Spain generated in early modern England” - Leticia Álvarez Recio Universidad de Sevilla, Spain.
List of Figures; Acknowledgments;Prologue: Translating Romance, Empire, and Spain; The Structure of This Book; Chapter One “Books of the Brave” English: Spanish Tales of Love and Arms in Translation; Chapter Two Dream Visions and Competing Dreams: Rewriting the Spanish Model in America; Chapter Three Sun Kings and Moon Queens: The Courting and Uncourting of Spain; Chapter Four Signs of England: Redcrosse Crosses the Ancient Boundary; Chapter Five Believing Bottom’s Dream: Rationalizing Exploration from America to Australia; Chapter Six Unruly Readers: Anti- Spanish Sentiment and the Feminizing of Romance; Epilogue: Spanish Literature in England before Don Quixote; Appendix I: English Readership of Spanish Romance, By the Numbers; Selected Bibliography; Index.