This chapter argues that in order to more fully understand the histories of Spain and Cuba in the nineteenth century a scholarly and objective account of Spanish colonial rule on the island is required. It focuses on a critical turning-point in the life of Brigadier Ramón Maria de Labra, experienced in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in the 1840s, and which is sparsely recorded. The chapter enquires into the historical significance of the unexpected events the Brigadier experienced, their likely impact on him and his family, and the possible long-term consequences for Cuba and Spain. In the central square of Cienfuegos, a port on the southern coast of Cuba, stands an imposing statue of Brigadier Labra. Despite the heightened racial tensions during the La Escalera episode, Labra successfully maintained peace in Cienfuegos and attempted to avert the persecution of the slaves and potential race conflict.

This section draws attention to the place of persuasion and rhetoric in cosmographical writings. It also offers a synoptic overview of the book’s arguments, drawing out the concerns with vision and perspective in particular, and closes with a final look at Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos.

Many nineteenth-century Spanish subjects longed to be universal. Universalism in Spanish territories ranged from expressions of brutal racism through to calls for revolutionary federalism, for Philippine nationalism, or for the emancipation of women. Subjects of the Spanish government in the nineteenth century had two primary, overlapping, but not identical motives for wishing to be universal. The first arose from the state's present situation and longer history. The second motive for universalism was a genuine concern with matters general to humanity. The central trope of El drama universal is transmigration, transmutation. In poetic universality, an intimacy is effected between what would otherwise have a confined context in place and time, and what is free of all such limits. Choice and judgement are equally fundamental to many versions of the universal laws said to govern human society.

This chapter expands on Spenser’s interests in the rhetoric of error and considers the ways in which The Faerie Queene constantly questions the nature of directive authority: in Spenser’s poem, a succession of figures representing false and true guidance results in the creation of an epistemological geography concerned with measurement, orientation, and memory. The chapter focuses on the relationship between the body and the determination of whereabouts in order to think about how Spenser uses ‘moving metaphor’ to model states of virtue and knowing; it tests the premise that Spenser’s allegories engage in debates concerning not only the mode’s efficacy but also the extent to which man, to borrow the formulation of Protagoras, can truly be considered as ‘the measure of all things’. The chapter reads across the first and second book of The Faerie Queene and finds cognate moments of compromised movement in works including Geoffrey Chaucer’s The House of Fame and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxica Epidemica, thus enriching the chapter’s reading of the key role that questions of motion and authority play in Spenser’s fictions.

This chapter focuses on analysing the main events that contributed to the making of the Spanish intellectuals from the 1890s into the early years of the twentieth century. It considers the conditions that prevailed at the birth of this new social actor, but it also deals with their defining characteristics and the practices that they shared. Writers, scientists, lawyers and scholars promoted the regeneration of the Spanish nation in what has been described as the 'birth of intellectual power' in Spain. The chapter argues that the emergence of the intellectual in Spain resulted from a combination of long and short-term factors, but also specific political events that unfolded around the turn of the nineteenth century. It traces the ways in which Spanish intellectuals intervened in public affairs, especially to denounce militarism and colonialism, and to defend their fellow intellectuals.

This chapter emphasizes the fact that the man of letters performed that role before the end of the century, within a largely non-democratic, liberal context but one characterized by political competition and freedom of speech. It focuses on a series of key roles of the man of letters: poet, journalist, playwright and lecturer. The development of group identity consolidated a repertoire of practices associated with the literary guild, which, at the same time, enabled recognition of writers' value within the context of bourgeois society. The period between 1834 and 1874 is paramount in re-defining the status of the men of letters in Spain. From embassies to the government and the ministries, in nineteenth-century Spain the man of letters was omnipresent, whether in the administration or in politics, as Zorrilla noted in his autobiography Recuerdos del tiempo viejo.

This chapter borrows the term ‘personal curvature’, used by the historical geographer J.H. Andrews to describe ‘the subjective element in a cartographer’s linework’, in order to suggest that analogous distortions can be seen in writings by Spenser and other Englishmen to cross the Irish Sea. Focusing on the fifth and sixth books of The Faerie Queene and moments from a variety of contemporary prose texts, this chapter considers the textures of the Irish environment, its wandering coastlines and unstable wetlands, in order to display how the westward gaze of Spenser and his fellow literary strategists struggled to find a rhetoric of disiy that could also acknowledge the frustrations of partial and provisional knowledge. The chapter engages with the work of cultural and historical geographers as well as the important work done by Spenserians concerning the role that Ireland plays in Spenser’s literary work. Through its readings of moments in which terraqueous spaces are placed under particular pressure, the chapter offers an approach that blends postcolonial readings of Spenser’s work with recent directions in ecocriticism and the work of the environmental humanities.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso offers an introduction into some general problems of interpretation of nineteenth-century European painting as a whole, and Spain specifically, at a key turning point in Picasso, and Modernism's, trajectory. Science and Charity is an example of how popular allegories were transformed by late nineteenth-century artists to help visualize larger social, metaphysical and, ultimately, aesthetic issues. Art historian María Teresa Ocaña sees Science and Charity as a 'watershed in Picasso's career' and as the last hommage 'Picasso granted his father'. The problems posed by Science and Charity are not those of heritage or genealogies that lead to mythic origins, at least not visual ones; such problems are the domain of provenance and iconography. The artistic debates concerning Naturalism versus idealism were, in Spain, nothing less than what has been termed 'culture wars' concerning the relations between the State, science and the Catholic religion.

By looking at Europe and America, the chapter presents a picture of the differences and similarities that characterized both areas in the national period. It provides an overarching picture of the rise and fall of the Hispanic Monarchy on both sides of the Atlantic. By looking at shared elements in the longue durée, the chapter sheds light on the institutions that shaped the process of nation-building in the period that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. The territorial jurisdiction of the Audiencias, it has been noted, map onto those of most of the new nations in Spanish America, just as is the case with the modern Autonomous Communities in Spain. It is more that the efforts made to reduce the differences between these territories were not made until the eighteenth century, and even then they were not very successful. The long-term efforts to make a durable state had ultimately unravelled.

Numerous nineteenth-century Spanish works of literature attest to their authors' concern with how to depict and address temporality, with how to tell time. These concerns were about the relationship between past, present and future and hinged on experiences of continuity and rupture, similarity and difference, circularity and linearity. This chapter reviews some key temporal dilemmas faced by a range of nineteenth-century Spanish writers and explores how they employed a series of narrative and rhetorical techniques to articulate the consequent complexities. Narratives which describe the nineteenth century as a time of optimism about the future and linear narratives, and the twentieth century as a time of jaded thinking, novelty fatigue and chronological disturbances, are flawed and overly simplistic. Literary criticism and literary history that deals with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spain is often snagged.

This section foregrounds the idea that the fictions of the late sixteenth century are shaped by a slippery epistemological moment, in which the wanderings of romance, and its relationship to epic and allegory, were called into question by new ways of making knowledge. In order to frame the readings of the curious spaces and geographies of Edmund Spenser’s generically hybrid writings, the opening of this book draws attention to how spatial images are used to perform, describe, and interrogate knowledge-making processes. The imaginative travail Spenser asks of his readers finds parallels in the perceptual travail demanded by early modern authors of non-fiction. These voices are more than contextual aids: reading Spenser’s poetry and prose also helps us to appreciate their strategies more fully. The literary ‘making’ that happens at Spenser’s hands is no less present in the work of his practically-minded contemporaries. The introduction also situates the book’s arguments within existing critical discussions.