ABSTRACT
The epilogue, on Washington Irving’s The Alhambra (1832), shows the writer adapting a familiar genre to reflect nostalgically on the cultural values and possible alternative historical paths that might have been lost in the U.S.’ rise to modern nationhood. Irving’s Iberian travelogue questions Americans’ basic assumptions about the ascendingly empowered future they believe they are inheriting from a declining East, reflecting melancholically on what appears to him a fallen present. Even more than this, however, Irving uses the ruins of a pre-modern, Arabic Spain as an analogue for a U.S. that wants to forget the sources and consequences of its own newfound power: a slave population it wants to pretend does not exist, and an imperialist rapine it wants to believe is always the work of others. In so doing, the text suggests that the nation has not quite escaped an older conception of a cyclical history, of national rises meeting with just as predictable declines. It is a supposedly outdated theory demonstrated quite dramatically in Spain by the crumbling pile of Eastern magnificence Irving finds abounding with stories, and with ghosts who seem to him only reflections of himself.
