Author: [BRUNEL (Antoine de)]:
Title: A Journey into Spain.
Description: London, Printed for Henry Herrignman..., 1670. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo, 163 x 105 mms., pp. [viii], 247 [248 blank], notes in pencil on recto of rear free end-paper, later wrappers; front hinge exposed, but a good to very good copy. This abridged translation of Voyage d'Espagne curieux, historique, et politique (1665) by Antoine de Brunel is also attributed to François van Aerssen, 1572-1641, and to his grandson François van Aerssen, 1630-1658. "Dutch diplomat Antoine de Brunel's Voyage d'Espagne (A Journey into Spain, 1665) tends to burden the reader with intricacies of court politics, but he also inserts here and there superb portraits of political figures - under lining the pettiness of the Spanish nobility - as well as poignant descriptions of a mostly desolate land, its miserable lodgings, its precarious buildings, and other evidence to Spain's low quality of life" (Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín González, César Domínguez, editors: A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula 2010). Brunel's volume was the first mention of bullfighting in Spain in English and had wide literary repercussions, being a source, for example, of Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (1932). Brunel discusses the bullfights over several pages (77 - 83).

Keywords: Travel topography prose


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