SOURCE: Schurlknight Donald E. “The Limits of Romantic Ideology: Larra's Review of Dumas' Antony and Moral Relativism.” In Spanish Romanticism in Context: Of Subversion, Contradiction and Politics, pp. 73-93. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Schurlknight explores Larra's understanding and interpretation of Romantic ideology and discusses some of the contradictions between that ideology and Larra's personal beliefs.

In this chapter we turn our attention from drama to the essay. Even so, our focus does not abandon the topic of theater, because the two-part article that we now investigate is a review of Alexandre Dumas' drama Antony. Here, too, in Mariano José de Larra's elegant prose essay we discover that contradiction and ambiguity are integral, if unwanted, aspects of his review.

Many critics consider Larra the most genuine of Spanish Romantics, because of his literary work and his life and because of the fusion in...