Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

Lehel Vadon: Spanish Roots of American Literature

4 it.

4 For many Americans Spain and Mexicostill mean troublesome neighbors, wars and political instability. There are two main channels by which Spanish culture has become part of the seventeeth-century colonists. The primary transmitter of Spanish culture was England. Samuel Sewall for example sent for his Spanish books to London and both Cotton Mather, his father Increase Mather and his grandfather Richard Mather and some poets: Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Benjamin Colman, Mather Byles, Joseph Green etc. were deeply rooted in the land they originated from, and her literature they were influenced by.5 Not only in the American colonies but in England, too, at the turn of the seventeenth century the Spanish cultural influences are not easy to define, their precise patterns still controversial. But it is certain that during the Elizabethan era the impact of Spanish novel was substantial. In seventeenth-century England the early romance Amadis de Gaula was read, and we may link Montemayor's Diana with the development of the English pastoral, Antonio de Guevara with euphuism, and Cervantes, with the popularity of the picaresque story. Both in old England and the young Republic Spanish historians, novelists and poets, especially religious poets were known in certain intellectual quarters. Culturally direct intercourse with Spain hardly existed. Another great beacon of Spanish culture to the seventeenth-century colonists was the already flourishing art and cultural wealth of Spanish America, especially Mexico. In the last decades of the sixteenth century some thirty thousand titles were imported into New Spain. Printing had begun there in 1535 or 1536. In Mexico City alone the professional booksellers numbered some fifty: and people in this town could listen to secular music, look at paintings by contemporary masters, attend poetic festivals, could see noble monuments of Spanish architecture or study medicine and mathematics.^ These were inexhaustible sources of Spanish influence on American culture. The third possible channel, the indirect influence of the Spanish settlements in the borderland of the country and the Southwest could not find its way to the northern seaboard colonies. The foundations of a Spanish or Mexican culture were just being laid in the regions later known as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. As early as 1598 in New Mexico were acted the religious plays which were to live on through the centuries. Here Los moros y los cristianos, Los pastores, Los tres magos? and other dramas were shown which form so picturesque a part of Spanish folk literature. New England knew little of such matters. At that time these regions seemed incredibly remote.