ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to present three essential features of the Spanish imaginary as it has been represented regularly and consistently in travel writing. The Second World War: the broadly affective, the cognitive and the distanced, the latter providing the basis for an overarching sense of otherness'. In using the term broadly affective' chapter deliberately bundling together the pre-cognitive aspects of engagement currently understood through non-representational theory in cultural geography as an embodied response, with the more expressive and emotional responses of the travel writers concerned. The chapter discusses the Spanish imaginary is actually a more complex cultural construction than that described by the Orientalist perspective. Whilst the imaginary was certainly fostered in the northern European consciousness and projected in the relatively modern literature. Gerald Brenan, account of this visit, A Rose for Winter, has already been mentioned and is a haunting and lyrical account of an imaginary Spain that now seems as lost in time as Irving's in Tales of the Alhambra.
