Spanish Romanticism and the Uses of History: Ideology and the Historical Imagination

by Flitter,Derek

• ISBN13: 9781900755979
• ISBN10: 1900755971
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-08-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 psychologically 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction: The Changeful History of Spanish Romanticism	1	(7)
The Meaning of the Mediaeval Revival	8	(31)
`Elementary' Historiography: Spanish Reactions to Guizot	39	(30)
`Ideal Eternal History': Vico's Providential Design	69	(26)
Exorcising the Revolutionary Demon	95	(29)
Reading Spain's Recent Past	124	(29)
Ideology and Aesthetics: The Uses of Literary History	153	(31)
Conclusions: History Singular and Plural	184	(17)
Bibliography	201	(10)
Index	211