The Edwardians and the Making of a modern Spanish Obsession

Spain was big business in Edwardian Britain. As the English writer and Hispanophile Letitia Higgin wrote in a 1904 article, “everyone goes to Spain nowadays, and almost everyone writes a book about it the moment he or she comes back.” She was right on the mark. This talk will explore some of the highlights (and lowlights!) of the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about Spain between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I. We will look at how the complexities of Spain’s place in the Edwardian imagination played out on-page and stage, in galleries, lecture rooms, exhibition halls, and private sitting rooms, in British cities, towns and villages from Plymouth to Dundee.

Kirsty Hooper, is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Warwick University. Author of books including The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession (2020); Mondariz-Vigo-Santiago: A Brief History of Galicia’s Edwardian Tourist Boom (2013); Writing Galicia into the World: New Poetics, New Cartographies (2011); co-author of Modern Literatures in Spain (forthcoming 2022). Her current project: a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, Hispanic London: Culture, Commerce and Community in the Nineteenth-Century City (2020-2023).