“’A favourite residence of magicians’: magia y esoterismo peninsulares en el romanticismo inglés”

English Romanticism offers several significant examples of intersections among esoterism, magic and the supernatural, the Spanish literary tradition, and Spain as an object of representation. To begin with, a manifestation of these intersections is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Lord Byron’s interest for the theatre of Calderón and its influence on their representations of the power of supernatural and demonic forces over the human dimension. Inatead, another series of works — by Walter Scott, Charles Robert Maturin and Edward Bulwer Lytton, among others — depicts Spain as a land historically linked to the development of magic in Europe and where, in turn, magic and the supernatural fatally bear upon natural and human reality. Through this dual analytical perspective, this article recovers the association between Spain, the supernatural and the superhuman as a central element of the vision of this country as a problematic place for the English, and more generally European, Romantic imagination.