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
7 from an eighteenth-century American. He shows Spain as a picturesque but bigoted conqueror, as a treacherous, brutal colonizer. The second type of writing inclines to romanticize Spain the conqueror or to celebrate its rulers as the transmitters of civilization into the New World. Even if the sympathy of the author is with the Aztec or native Indian, the splendor of Spain glows in the narratives. The epic treatment of the Conquest is mainly apparent in the poetry and drama of the period. Even the poetry of Joel Barlow, who hated Spain, is sometimes under the spell of the conquistadores. His republicanism painted the Spanish foe as Milton painted Satan: majestic and heroic. Throughout this period the attraction of romantic Spanish subjects continued. William Dunlap's Don Carlos , an adaptation from Schiller, was a favorite on the New York stage.* * Dunlap produced three other plays: The Virgin of the Suti, Pizarro in Peru, The Death of Roll a, and an opera, The 19 Knight of the Guadalquivir on Spanish and Spanish-American themes. Theatregoers could see Susanna Haswell Row soil's Slaves in Algiers, whose plot is based upon the tale of the captive in Don Quixote. * ^ Eighteenth century poetry invoked the bold and semi-mythical Columbus and his voyages in spite of the fact that only a little was known about him. The main sources regarding the great discoverer were the life by his son Fernando and the narratives by Las Casas. Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau initiated in American literature the endless series of narratives, tales and verses on Columbus. In creating the first version of his moralizing epic poem in heroic couplets, The Vision of Columbus (1787). Barlow became, as he was called later, the father of Columbian poetry. Barlow was not the first American poet to celebrate an idealized Columbus. Freneau had composed a poem, Columbus to Ferdinand, and thirteen years before The Vision of Columbus he finished his more important verse, The pictures of Columbus, the Genoese. The eighteen scenes of this poem are an ostosyllabic, five-stress verse with many real and fanciful episodes about the life of the explorer. Freneau's pseudoromantic monologue with Spanish backgrounds and Spanish characters was prophetic of many similar poems on Columbus in the nineteenth, and even in the twentieth century. The white man had always been interested in the mystic ways of life of the Indian. Americans had already heard legends of powerful princes and chiefs, gentle races, friendly people living in nature, with wise governments, beautiful and characteristic cultures of their own. The concept of "the noble savage", as he was called in the eighteenth-century Europe, appeared in European literature, too. Rousseau, Montaigne and Chateaubriand moved in this world. Bessenyei revived the Hungarian noble savage in his Travel ofTarimenesz • Encouragement for this illusion could come from England,
