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Ruin and Restitution: Reinterpreting Romanticism in Spain. Philip W. Silver Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. Pp. 175.
Ruin and Restitution: is not just one more work about the poetics of Spanish romanticism, but one of those rare books which, from time to time, capsize received knowledge. It asks questions that have been staring Hispanists in the face without being explicitly formulated, questions about all they purportedly wanted to know about class, nation, politics, and ideology, but did not dare to ask. By tacitly locating recent literary historiography in the national romantic continuum that constitutes his object of study, Philip Silver provides some indications of why these questions were not raised before.
Although nineteenth-century Spain was constructed by central and northern European contemporaries as the embodiment of romanticism-an extended commonplace that prompted Mario Praz to write a book on Unromantic Spain-' literary or philosophical production in this country could not match in intention or quality the aesthetic renewal launched by the German and English romantics. To Novalis's summons: "Die Welt muff romantisiert werden" (the world must be romanticized), Spanish poets responded with a distorted recuperation of the past. For this flawed recuperation of what they saw as the national past, their uninformed apprehension of the new aesthetic was in part to blame. Another reason, largely unexplored in the present book, is the fact that, in the absence of a national system of education until the 1857 Moyano law, poets supplied a great deal of knowledge about the "national" past, much as Perez Galdos's National Episodes would supply the modicum of history necessary to nationalize various generations of Spaniards at the end of the century. In this context of a missing national tradition, it may be entirely appropriate to speak of the romantic invention of the national past. Instead of engaging in the philosophically productive dialectic between classic and modern poetry, nineteenth-century Spanish poets were in thrall to the Castilian literary tradition, from which they derived their own sense of Spain's historical development and "romantic" values, with the consequence that, as Silver observes in his Introduction, "from 1700 to 1828, Spanish literature seems to have survived by recycling its literary past" (xii).
The riddle of waning creativity after an extended period of exceptional output from the fifteenth...