From the religiosity of nature to socialist spiritism: Anglo-Hispanic synergies, Felicia Hemans and the female authors of the 19th century Sevillian press

Abstract

From a moderate liberal concept of religiosity of nature to the radicalism of a spiritism intertwined with utopian socialism that broke with the Catholic orthodoxy, the female authorial collaboration in the nineteenth-century Sevillian press defended religious tolerance against its constricted society. Although traditionally its identification with contemporary conventions has been highlighted, the detailed study of newspapers of the time reveals the importance of the rupturist positioning, enabling the rereading of the female authorial role based on the group led by the Sevillian Amalia Domingo Soler and that it could be imbued with spiritist reinterpretation after the reception in the Spanish press of the work of English female contemporaries such as Felicia Hemans, the most widely read in the English-speaking world of her time and in turn influenced by the heterodoxy of Blanco White, also from Seville, as a result of synergies generated by the Spanish liberal exodus to London at the beginning of the 19th century.