Spanish Bawds and Quixotic Libraries Adventures and Misadventures in Early English Hispanism and World Literature Pérez Fernández, José María Traducción y comercio Traducción e imperialismo Estudios de traducción Estudios ingleses Hispanismo inglés Translation and Trade Translation and Empire Translation Studies English Hispanism English Studies Anglo-Spanish Relations James Mabbe Thomas Percy La Celestina The Spanish Bawd John Bowle Cervantismo inglés Cervantes in England World Literature International Republic of Letters This is the author’s version of an article which has been accepted for publication in the journal Comparative Literature (ISSN 0010-4124) (ca. March 2017). I wish to express my gratitude to the editor of the journal, and to its publisher Duke University Press, for their permission to publish this previous version at the University of Granada institutional repository. This essay focuses on two early English Hispanists, James Mabbe (1571/2–1642?) and Thomas Percy (1729–1811), who illustrate different stages in the pre-history of Comparative and World Literature. It will look into their appropriation of La Celestina and Don Quijote as case studies for the use of certain tropes to legitimize the traffic of political and cultural capital involved in the creation of domestic and transnational literary canons. These tropes include conquest and war, finance and trade, community and language as currency. The networks throughout which their texts circulated, their different formats and means of production, all exemplify the mechanisms for the establishment of an International Republic of Letters. This led in turn to the gradual emergence of a World Canon created under the auspices Enlightened Universalism, but also driven to a considerable extent by the self-interested policies of cultural imperialism. 2016-04-19T10:17:51Z 2016-04-19T10:17:51Z 2016-04-19 preprint http://hdl.handle.net/10481/40935 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ open access Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License