Luz Elena Ramírez has added another book to the rapidly expanding field of scholarship that investigates the complicated and multifaceted relationship between Great Britain and Latin America. Historians such as Matthew Brown, D. C. M. Platt, Frank Dawson, María Teresa Berruezo León, Gabriel Paquette, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and literary critics Robert Aguirre and Cole Heinowitz, among many others, have examined aspects of the political, intellectual, financial, military, and cultural exchange between those two regions. The ambitious questions that concern Ramírez in this book are why did certain Latin American countries attract particular attention in Britain, to what extent does that writing reflect actual historical conditions, what relationship exists between the literature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science and exploration and the twentieth-century preoccupation with identity, and, finally, of what use is literary theory in identifying these patterns? She argues that “English identity is as much a construction of the self as it is of the other, and it is therefore not as stable (or arrogant) as much post-colonial criticism might suggest” (17–18).

In order to investigate her thematic questions, Ramírez selected five texts across four centuries and claims to have identified a distinct discourse, which she labels as “Americanist” (2). The works that Ramírez chose for her study are Robert Schomburgk's 1848 edition of Walter Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana (1596), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1904), Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1912), Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), and an assortment of Graham Greene's stories set in Mexico, Argentina, and Panama (1938–84). Her first chapter aims to set out the themes of British representations of Latin America over four hundred years and emphasizes a British penchant for criticizing their own authority. Among the rhetorical positions she associates with Americanists are a view of the New World as paradise, an assumption of their right to rule in America, the encounter with an Other as a form of discovery, the promotion of science and commerce, a fear of going native, and (in the twentieth century) a pronounced search for self. All these themes, however, are quite common to travel literature the world over, and it is never made entirely clear what is uniquely American about these concerns or how they might differ from similar British literatures on India or Africa or Australia or Canada.

Buried deep within the book, and never addressed directly, is the historiographical issue of the competing Black Legend–White Legend interpretations of the New World colonial experience. Ramírez seems quite enamored with Ralegh's account and uncritically repeats the stereotypes of Francis Drake as a man of plunder and Ralegh as a man of settlement (32). These polarized conceptualizations are a very significant (and self-conscious) part of the emerging British national self-image during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Any discussion of British–Latin American relations during the colonial period must also wrestle with the Protestant-Catholic rivalry and wars of religion, which were prosecuted on and around the Atlantic and which were also closely related to the British conquest and colonization of Ireland.

Although it claims to take an interdisciplinary approach, the book is strongest when it undertakes a close reading of the selected texts under scrutiny and submits them to a literary analysis. Ramírez dutifully makes reference to many of the authors and theoretical models that dominate contemporary literary criticism, including hybridity (Bhabha), orientalism and the Other (Said), travel and identity (Pratt), and the Atlantic world (Pagden), and handles these interpretations with great skill. Her history is significantly weaker, relying on a textbook and a handful of other general sources. Likewise, a historian would be loath to assert any meaningful patterns drawn from five literary texts spanning four centuries and different widely divergent genres. There is little distinction between the representations of Spanish America and Portuguese America, each of which had a distinct historical relationship to Britain and occupied a different role in the national imagination. As a literary critic, however, Ramírez is surer footed. In her chapter on Conrad's Nostromo, she includes a useful critique of postcolonial theory, although she herself occasionally lapses into the same trap of generalizing the actions and attitudes of “the British” or “the Spanish” as stable entities. Since the authors she studies were experienced travelers themselves, one is left to wonder whether Latin Americans they met along the way had any agency or input into the making of their images in the minds of the wandering foreigners.

Luz Elena Ramírez has hit upon a significant theme in British literature, that of a preoccupation with Latin America as a distinct geographical and imaginary space. As the fantastically wealthy colonial dominion of Britain's major imperial rival, Spain, Latin America represented wealth, power, adventure, and a site for religious proselytization. The book is strongest when it concerns itself with a close reading of the texts under examination, but Ramírez's analyses suggest a deep cultural attraction to Americanist themes that has prevailed among British writers for well over four centuries. Historians, political scientists, literary critics, art historians, and others, therefore, can gain some valuable insights from her work.