In general, self-reflection on the promotion of the languages and cultures of Iberia has diverged significantly on either side of the North Atlantic. The anglophone areas of western Europe have, with characteristic reserve and traditional phlegm, proved hesitant to involve themselves in a reasoned debate on the issue and, with a geniality characteristic of warlords in the best gangster films, have preferred to make things personal. The wounded, class-conscious lamentations on the subject's orientation uttered by Barry Jordan in his initial exercise in metacriticism, for example, were amplified significantly in Malcolm Read's (“Travelling South”; Language, Text, Subject; Educating) subsequent no-holdsbarred diatribe against the discipline and its ideological direction in the form of short shrift visited on its founding fathers and its generalized compliance with the Establishment. The ensuing polemic, involving Nicholas Round and Stephen Hart (“Politics of Hispanism”; “From Schizoidism”) among others, still remains as one of the most striking and violent interchanges in the history of peninsular studies in our islands.

Happily, the interchange conducted in North America, while no less committed, has tended to retain a restraint, pertinence and analysis of a more educated and less intimate nature. In this more reserved environment, a whole series of commentators have outlined convincingly a particular dimension of the subject which the present essay would aspire to explore: I refer, of course, to how the institutionalization of what we know as Hispanism in Great Britain and Ireland has been influenced by a vision in keeping with the imperialist designs of a whole generation of intellectuals for whom Spanish philology was synonymous with the promotion of the language of Castile and its culture and the corresponding exclusion of other tongues native to the state and their creative expression.