Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in the Gruta de Camões: A Spanish Novelist's Passage to Macau

This essay examines how Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's narrative "Viaje a Macao" in La vuelta al mundo de un novelista functions within the broader vindication of Spanish and Portuguese enterprises in East Asia that is a key subtext of the 1924 travelogue. If in the Philippines Blasco witnes...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Romance notes 2020-11, Vol.60 (2), p.409-418
Main Author: George, David R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Novelists
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This essay examines how Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's narrative "Viaje a Macao" in La vuelta al mundo de un novelista functions within the broader vindication of Spanish and Portuguese enterprises in East Asia that is a key subtext of the 1924 travelogue. If in the Philippines Blasco witnessed the vestiges of a lost empire, in Macau he observed with certain elation a continued presence as well as a potential for the reassertion of Iberian power in Asia. Retracing the story and the history that are woven together in the author's account of his visit to the Portuguese colony and literary pilgrimage to the Gruta de Camoes, uncovers how, from a Republican and cosmopolitan perspective, Macau's past and present are configured in the text as a representation of Pan-Iberian modernity vis-à-vis the turbulent geopolitical context of the 1920s.
ISSN:0035-7995
2165-7599
2165-7599
DOI:10.1353/rmc.2020.0029