Viaje y romance en Canarias: el discurso del paraíso en dos novelas publicadas en los Estados Unidos

Abstract

The Canary Islands, a favorite destination for a wide range of travelers, have inspired a considerable number of publications. Texts by British authors abound in the numerous English bibliography on the Canaries, but some works published in the United States, both by American novelists and scientists, have also been detected. After compiling and studying a corpus of English popular romance fiction novels set in the Canaries, we have been able to confirm that this type of text tends to portray the islands as a paradise, an ideal location for romance. This paradise discourse will be our focus of attention in this paper. The protagonists of the two texts analyzed here are Americans who visit and describe the island where they live their romances. Nancy Kennedy’s (1979) and Robin Jones Gunn’s (2011) novels are works of fiction, though the latter includes aspects from the real trips the author made to Gran Canaria.