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"The Exotic Politics of the Domestic: The Alhambra
as Symbolic Place in British Romantic Poetry"
by Diego Saglia
The article examines a cluster of British Romantic texts
connected by the theme of the Alhambra and the Moorish civilization. This aspect of
British Romantic exoticism has not been investigated yet, mainly because its texts belong
to non-canonical, forgotten or extremely marginal authors. It is however interesting to
consider some of them - such as Hemans's The Abencerrage and England and Spain, Barbarina
Brand's Gonzalvo of Cordoba, Lord Porchester's The Moor, Mary Mitford's Blanch - for this
investigation will not simply lead to the reconstruction of a missing segment of exoticist
literature. Indeed, behind their descriptions of a monumentally other place - the palace
of the Alhambra in Granada or similar palaces - these texts evoke a colossal and
unfamiliar "home." And in this peculiar locale, the texts on the Alhambra
articulate a series of themes relative to the domestic ideology such as the clash between
private and public, the role of woman in the polity, or the relation between the
"public" and the "intimate sphere." While countering the definition of
exoticism as escapist literature, this article aims at demonstrating how domestic tales
set in the other home - the Alhambra - question, undermine, but sometimes also support,
the mandates of a domestic ideology seen as an enforcing and objective set of rules.
CONTENTS VOL. 34, No. 3, 1997
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