It is hard not to see this book as anything but an attempt to link European romanticism to the ethnopoetic sublime. The book is so overwhelmingly European in its contents that its attempts at "orientalisms" (that is actually one of the titles of a section in the book!) seem just that: orientalist. It would almost have been better to stick to Europe, because a little bit is worse than nothing if presented in such a weird way: to represent the East to the Western imagination. The Latin American and Spanish representation is laughably meagre. Even the US barely registers. Nothing is presented in the original language (except English language texts of course). It's one of those projects I want to admire but just can't.
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