Robert Patrick Newcomb – författare

"Iberianism" refers to a minority intellectual current which emerged in Spain and Portugal during the mid-nineteenth century and developed in step with the Iberian Peninsula’s successive crises. Iberianism sought to upend the peninsula’s political and intellectual status quo by advocating closer ties between the two peninsular kingdoms, and more equitable relations between the Spanish state’s constituent regions, including Castile, Catalonia, Basque Country, and Galicia. Robert Patrick Newcomb’s Iberianism and Crisis examines how prominent peninsular essay writers and public intellectuals, active around the turn of the twentieth century, looked to Iberianism to address a succession of political, economic, and social crises that shook the Spanish and Portuguese states to their foundations. Bringing into dialogue prominent fin-de-siècle peninsular literary intellectuals, including Joan Maragall, Oliveira Martins, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Antero de Quental, and Miguel de Unamuno, Newcomb engages in a comparative analysis of textual sources across national and regional borders, languages, and literary canons.

Is Brazil part of Latin America, or an island unto itself? As Nossa and Nuestra América: Inter-American Dialogues demonstrates, this question has been debated by Brazilian and Spanish American intellectuals alike since the early nineteenth century, though it has received limited scholarly attention and its answer is less obvious than you might think. This book charts Brazil’s evolving and often conflicted relationship with the idea of Latin America through a detailed comparative investigation of four crucial Latin American essayists: Uruguayan critic José Enrique Rodó, Brazilian writer-diplomat Joaquim Nabuco, Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes, and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, one of Brazil’s preeminent historians. While these writers are canonical figures in their respective national literary traditions, their thoughts on Brazilian–Spanish American relations are seldom investigated, and they are rarely approached from a comparative perspective. In Nossa and Nuestra América, Newcomb traces the development of two parallel essayistic traditions: Spanish American continentalist discourse and Brazil’s solidly national exegetic tradition. With these essayistic traditions in mind, he argues that Brazil plays a necessary—and necessarily problematic—role in the intellectual construction of “Latin America.” Further, in traversing the Luso-Hispanic frontier and bringing four of Latin America’s preeminent thinkers into critical dialogue, Newcomb calls for a truly comparative approach to Luso-Brazilian and Spanish American literary and cultural studies. Nossa and Nuestra América will be of interest to scholars and students of Latin American and Luso-Brazilian literature and ideas, and to anyone interested in rethinking comparative approaches to literary texts written in Portuguese and Spanish.

Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.