Conquest and Reclamation in the Transatlantic Imagination

Field work in Mexico and Peru and research in London furnished the author of this study with first-hand observations of artefacts and cultural sites, and the opportunity to elaborate on descriptions found in George Henty, Rider Haggard, and George Griffith’s Amerindian fictions; this approach offers a fresh path of inquiry for interdisciplinary scholarship and study.

The book pursues an important topic in transatlantic studies as it investigates primary sources for the fictional retellings of the Spanish conquest, specifically Amerindian novels by George Henty, Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. These sources include Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. vols. I-XII [c 1590], William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico, During a Residence of Two Years in that Country (1843), Sir Clement Markham’s A History of Peru (1892), and Hiram Bingham’s 1913 National Geographic account of his ‘discovery’ of Machu Picchu; such references provide a ‘paper trail’ for students and scholars conducting their own research.

Ramirez proposes in the book the cultural concept of reclamation and illustrates how it operates in Henty, Haggard, and Griffith’s Amerindian fictions; she points to literary motifs such as the revival of ancient languages, symbols, and customs; the revitalization of royal bloodlines; the material restitution of what had been lost with the Spanish invasion; and the identification of the role of the English adventurer who plays a key part in the campaign of reclamation.

This study engages specialists and students from multiple disciplines as it taps into developments in art, archaeology, history, and cultural studies; such interdisciplinarity affords audiences a richer, more nuanced perspective of the Amerindian fictions than approaching texts from one field of study.

This book reflects on how historically real castaways Geronimo Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero and Hernán Cortés’s interpreter La Malinche, and royal figures such as Manco Capac acted as cultural mediators who negotiated the ways of the Old World, and the New, and how these personalities arguably inspired similar figures in the novels of George Henty, Rider Haggard, and George Griffith; as such, Ramirez offers educators a new approach to teaching history and literature.

This book illustrates how Rider Haggard’s travels to Mexico and George Griffith’s Andean tour of Peru fulfilled Victorian expectations of literary authenticity, conveying what Ramirez calls an ‘I was there’ quality in the Amerindian adventure.

This study incorporates in its study of Amerindian fictions Jane Tompkins’ concept of ‘cultural work’, Robert Aguirre’s argument about the British trafficking of Amerindian artefacts, Robert MacFarlane’s account of what constitutes plagiarism and originality in the nineteenth century, Walter Maltby’s interpretation of the Black Legend, Roger Luckhurst’s notion of, ‘the weight of plausibility,’ John Seider’s study of lost race novels, Doris Sommer’s concept of foundational fictions, and P J Cain and AG Hopkins’s definition of informal imperialism; in so doing, the book brings new literary and cultural connections into alignment, thereby enriching the transatlantic discourse about the conquest of Mexico and Peru.

Geographies discussed in the literary analyses include Mexico, Tezcuco, the Yucatan, Anahuac, Tenochtitlan, Peru, Pachacamac, Tavantinsuyu, Cusco, Lima, the Andes, Machu Picchu, England and Spain.