“These cruel strangers: la España Negra y el debate revolucionario en la literatura inglesa de finales del siglo XVIII”

In eighteenth-century English-language literature, the imaginary of terrifying Spain develops gradually until it comes to constitute a set of recurrent signs that, at the end of the century, forcefully re-emerge in an ideological-cultural context marked by the French Revolution. Focusing on the 1790s, this essay examines works ranging from William Godwin’s Political Justice and Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro, Godwin’s St Leon and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in order to explore how, during this decade, the Spanish and Peninsular black legend features regularly in ideologically contrasting reflections on modes of control and power relations connected with the processes of socio-political modernization that characterize Romantic-period British culture.