ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the potential for travel writers to create meaning around the places they visited, and evoke affective registers of experience and expressions of emotion to create an intense imaginary that stands in relation to their own identity and the realities of Spanish culture. It examines that such an underpinning has prompted converge on the Spanish Imaginary, a place in which all of the senses are drawn together to give and reproduce those meanings by which it has come to be known. The chapter discusses the role women travel writers have played in relation to the creation and dissemination of the Spanish Imaginary. It argues that the thing that enabled Spain to be so effectively 'Othered' was its Moorish heritage, which is something that travel writers referred to constantly. The chapter focuses on the encounter between two highly representational cultures - the Anglo-Saxon and the Spanish–Mediterranean –in the nineteenth century, from which emerged 'the Spanish Imaginary'.
