This monograph examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how Prescott's histories inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure entertained young transatlantic audiences, was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru, and a way to impart British values. Such values compel the characters and narrators of novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romances under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty's By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), Rider Haggard's Montezuma's Daughter (1893) and George Griffith's Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard's of Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty's Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith's Romance of Golden Star (1897).

Ramirez examines British literary representations of Latin America from the 16th through the 20th centuries, with particular attention to travel writing and fiction published during and after Latin American independence. Locating these representations within the political and economic histories of the countries in which they are set, she places works by Sir Walter Ralegh, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Malcolm Lowry, and Graham Greene within a critical context that can best be called ""Americanist"" and surveys the prominent themes of these works. She also examines their imperialist impulses and their changing master cultural narratives, from Charles Gould's ""idea"" of empire and his faith in commercial development for Latin America in Conrad's Nostromo to Lowry's Under the Volcano, a story of a failed and alcoholic English Consul in 1930s Mexico. Americanist literature, as Ramirez sees it, manifests mostly informal aspects of imperialism, reflecting the British desire to invest, develop, map, and catalog in countries as varied as Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Brazil. Ramirez argues that British representations of Latin America reveal an authorial freedom to advance imperial and commercial projects on one hand, while questioning the English self and sense of strangeness in the New World on the other. Especially in the 19th- and 20-century works under consideration, she reveals an acute sense of vulnerability as British power worldwide had begun to crumble. Expanding on the critical conversation surrounding ""Orientalism"" and ""New World Studies,"" Ramirez's examination of informal British imperialism and the struggle of motives represented in each of the selected narratives opens a fascinating new terrain of texts reflecting the historical relationship between Britain and Latin America.