The Spanish Imaginary : a trilogy of frontiers

There are three 'frontiers' at work in this chapter. The first regards a geographical frontier, in that the chapter takes as its focus the encounter between two highly representational cultures - the Anglo-Saxon and the Spanish-Mediterranean - in the nineteenth century from which emerged 'the Spanish Imaginary' (after Taylor 2004; see Watson 2014). This imaginary developed over time and with the active involvement of various representational agencies, emerging as a socially constructed and imagined version of Spain that has since come to be seen as the 'real thing'. Our interest in this chapter is with the particular representational agency of British and American travel writers, who brought their own sense of modernity to look upon Spain from a perceived position of dominance - industrially, militarily and, not least, culturally