SOURCE: Kirkpatrick, Susan. “Liberal Romanticism and the Female Protagonist in Macías.” Romance Quarterly 35, no. 1 (February 1988): 51-8

In the following essay, Kirkpatrick maintains that Larra's conception of individual subjectivity within the aesthetics of Romanticism and within liberal political reform remained male and bourgeois.

In his 1836 essay “Literatura,” Mariano José de Larra called for a new literature, “expresión de la sociedad nueva que componemos, toda de verdad como de verdad es nuestra sociedad.”¹ Larra's development of this idea proposes as the mission of his generation a new concept of the object of literature, a concept fundamental to liberal Romanticism. It is above all in his elaboration of what he means by the truth common to literature and society that we can see the premises linking Romantic aesthetics to liberalism: “En política el hombre no ve más que intereses y derechos, es decir, verdades. En literatura no...