The Role of Historicism in the Literary Education of Spanish and Hispano-American Students in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Abstract

In this paper we address the historical process in which the displacement of Rhetoric as a school discipline and the implementation of the new model of literary education based on the learning of the History of Literature in Spanish and Latin American classrooms from the mid-nineteenth century onwards took place.

To this end, we describe the theoretical constructs and ideological notions underpinning this model of literary education devised by the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie to enable schoolchildren to acquire the political concept of nationality and to admire the writers and works of our past, who embodied and developed the political, economic, aesthetic and ideological ideals on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally, using examples of literary criticism, educational legislation, textbooks and school exercises, we review the critical, pedagogical, school and classroom canons in order to contrast the way in which scientific theories are or are not converted into teachable ‘knowledge’ in Spanish secondary schools.