American Cultural Anxiety and the Beginnings of Hispanism: George Ticknor Reads Spanish Literature

Leigh, Taylor Carrington

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Year:: 2018
Contributor:: Leigh, Taylor Carrington (creator); Vaquero, Mercedes (Advisor); Martinez-Pinzon, Felipe (Reader); Bass, Laura (Reader); Brown University. Department of Hispanic Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: intellectual history; Ticknor, George, 1791-1871; History of Spanish literature (Ticknor, George); Hispanism; Spanish literature; Spain; Massachusetts--Boston; literary history; Cantar de mío Cid; North American review; Bouterwek, Friedrich, 1766-1828; Sismondi, J.-C.-L. Simonde de (Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde), 1773-1842; Prescott, William Hickling, 1796-1859; Staël, Madame de (Anne-Louise-Germaine), 1766-1817; Spanish history; National character; Jauss, Hans Robert; Fish, Stanley Eugene; Harvard College (1780- ); Universität Göttingen
Extent:: x, 255 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/rqga-q938

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Abstract:: George Ticknor (1791-1871) was an instrumental figure in establishing a scholarly reputation for the United States in the early to mid nineteenth century. His writings on Spanish literature represent an impressive foray into a hitherto understudied field, and his efforts in that arena are largely responsible for the formation of Hispanism as an academic discipline. As a young man, Ticknor travelled from his native Boston to Göttingen, Germany to complete his education, and it is there that he received an offer from Harvard College to occupy the newly established Smith Professorship of French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, the first position of its kind in the United Sates. Ticknor thus set out amassing a world-class collection of Spanish books that he would use to support his thesis on Spanish literary and cultural decline over the centuries, a thesis chiefly propagated in his groundbreaking History of Spanish Literature (1849). Reflecting on Spain’s contemporary state of distress, Ticknor saw the result of an aberrant national character that was complicit in the religious and political oppression that had gradually stymied Spanish literary genius. Ticknor’s writings only become truly compelling, however, when placed within their historical context. This dissertation explores those contextual details and suggests that Ticknor, in writing on Spanish literature, was also responding to a prevalent domestic cultural anxiety regarding the United States’ lack of literary agency. It will explain how Ticknor received and mediated Spanish literature according to the shared critical precepts of the Boston Brahmin interpretive community, and it will propose that Ticknor’s exacting evaluation of that literary corpus served as a prescriptive and cautionary message to his countrymen.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018

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Rights: In Copyright
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Leigh, Taylor Carrington, "American Cultural Anxiety and the Beginnings of Hispanism: George Ticknor Reads Spanish Literature" (2018). Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/rqga-q938

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Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department.
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