1st Edition

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

By Luz Elena Ramirez Copyright 2023
236 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

236 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

236 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Conquest
1. The Rewards of Adventure in Henty’s By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891)
2. Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893) as a Memoir of the Spanish Conquest
3. ‘I Was There’: George Griffith’s Trek on the Inca Trail and Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898)

Part II: Reclamation
4. Eclipsing the Spanish in Haggard’s Virgin of the Sun (1922)
5. The Rewards of Speculation and the Promise of Development in Henty’s Treasure of the Incas (1902)
6. The Campaign of Reclamation in George Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (1897)

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

Index

Biography

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).