Performing Spanishness

Investigates the way that Spain, Spanish culture and Spanish identity were represented on British stages, concert halls and other public and private spaces. Considers the figure of the Spanish dancer as an avatar for the simultaneous decline and persistence of French-mediated Romantic stereotypes in the British imagination. Explores the opportunities for British people to ‘embody’ Spanishness, through performance, fancy dress, and the role of music hall parodies in domesticating Spanish otherness.

Exhibitions and Exchange

Considers how the flow of aesthetic objects, capital and knowledge between Britain and Spain was conditioned by the unequal balance of power between Britain and Spain. Traces the history of exhibiting Spanish art and the factors shaping British taste in Spanish artists, including the professionalization of knowledge about Spain and Spanish arts. Explores the dark side of cultural flows and the effects of Spanish attempts to take back control, including the controversial trade in Spanish artworks, and the exploitative fraud known as the ‘Spanish swindle’.

Baedeker and Beyond: Tourism and Colonialism

Explores the emergence of mass tourism to Spain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period, and its intersection with British quasi-colonial infrastructure-building in the country. Considers the transformation in tourist guidebooks in the wake of the first Baedeker guide to Spain in 1898, and the emergence of an discourse of ‘anti-tourism’. Explores the proactive role of Spanish regional tourism associations in expanding British imagined geographies of Spain.

What the Edwardians Knew About Spain

This chapter provides an overview history of British knowledge about Spain from the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. It explores the consequences of Spain’s shifting geopolitical position during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the foundations for British emotional, economic and infrastructural investment in the country. It pays particular attention to the rhetorical and material legacy of the profound imbalance of power between Britain and Spain.

Ask the Experts: Spanish Studies and the Struggle for Authority

Traces the professionalization of Spanish-language education and the emergence of the academic discipline of Spanish Studies, against a background of economic and commercial investment in Spain. Provides a critical analysis of the early years of Spanish Studies and the determination of the first academics to transcend the discipline’s commercial origins. Recovers the works and legacy of scholars excluded from the academy whose contributions to Edwardian knowledge about have been largely forgotten.

Epilogue: ‘Sunny Spain’ (1914)

Reaffirms how the transformation in Edwardian knowledge about Spain created a new, dynamic and diverse repertoire of Spanish images, shaped by the interests and experiences of an unprecedentedly diverse and uncompromisingly modern collection of experts. Traces the history of the failed ‘Sunny Spain’ tourism exhibition of 1914, and the insights it provides about the conflict between the Spanish desire to showcase their country as a modern economic partner, and the British view conditioned by a combination of French-mediated Romanticism and characteristically British condescension.