Conquest and Reclamation in the Transatlantic Imagination: The Amerindian Fictions of Henty, Haggard, and Griffith

Luz Elena Ramirez

jun 2023 · Taylor & Francis

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This book examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how these accounts inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure both entertained young transatlantic audiences and was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru. Henty, Haggard, and Griffith, moreover, used their tales of adventure as a platform to impart British values to their readers. Such values compel the characters and narrators of the novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romance adventures under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty’s By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), H. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and George Griffith’s Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard’s Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty’s Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (1897).

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Luz Elena Ramirez completed her undergraduate degree at Newcomb College, Tulane University in New Orleans and her PhD in English literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino, Ramirez locates her scholarship at the intersection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature, transatlantic studies, and archaeological fiction. She published British Representations of Latin America (2007), and subsequently edited the Encyclopedia of Hispanic-American Literature (2008). More recently, she has written scholarly critiques of British fantasy writers George Griffith, William Hope Hodgson, and Bram Stoker, delving deeply into archaeological fiction with the chapter essay entitled, ‘The Intelligibility of the Past in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars' in Eleanor Dobson’s edited volume, Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt (2020).