Spanish Romanticism and the Uses of History

Spanish Romantic historiography was characterized by ideologically significant narratives of past events. Flitter examines those narratives within the intellectual parameters that defined them, probing the conceptual strategies by which writers represented history. Central to his discussion are the competing interpretations derived from Guizot's progressive formula and Vico's cyclical and providentialist account - the battleground upon which politically interested interpretations of history struggled for intellectual supremacy. Other matters considered include the medieval revival, the rejection of Enlightenment formulae, the fear of an absent but pyschologically potent Revolution, Romantic diagnoses of nineteenth-century reality within the prism of the 'Two Spains', and the entailments of Romantic literary history and its construction of a casticista cultural identity.