Romanticism was born in Spain as a controversial movement and its study has followed the same path through the years. The death of the absolutist King Fernando VII in 1833 brought about a period of political and cultural openness in Spain, which translated into an increase in the number of periodical publications. Parallel to these events, the Spanish intellectuals who fled into exile after the restoration of the absolutist regime in 1823, returned to their country, bringing with them the ideas of liberal romanticism. In the political arena, the década progresista took place from 1834 to 1844, in which different revolutions altered the political and social scene in Spain.
The circumstances cited above have lead literary critics in the past to identify the Spanish romantic movement as entirely ideological with a liberal nature. The historical context seemed to favor a progressive position upon which was built a critical tradition that defined Spanish romanticism as ideological, superficial, unauthentic, or even nonexistent, due to the primacy of liberal ideology in romantic literature. However, in some cases, because of this inference, not enough attention was paid to the primary romantic sources which, due to limited publications of books in the period, consisted mainly of newspapers and magazines.
The recovery of Spanish romantic ideas from those principles affirmed by the romantics themselves has produced critical perspectives which are far from those traditionally accepted. In 1992, Derek Flitter presented a concept that substitutes the Spanish liberal romanticism for a historic romanticism based on German romantic ideas. To support his conclusions, Flitter recovers part of the literary theory and criticism that the romantic writers manifested in literary publications.
Notably among all of the literary romantic periodicals from this decade, were El Artista (1834-35) and No me Olvides (1837-38), which contained many similar themes and featured the same collaborators. Although the former has been reprinted in a facsimile edition, the study of the latter has not received a monographic study that organizes its content, researches the biography of its director, and analyzes the romantic ideas that it tried to convey.
In this context, my dissertation compiles all the information available about the magazine to generate a monographic study that facilitates access to the available material in the periodical. It also presents a detailed analysis of its contents, showing the deep romantic personality of the publication, while separating it from the polemic notion of “eclecticism”, which traditionally characterized the literature of the years 1837-38 in Spain.
This work concludes that the ideas expressed in No me Olvides support the romantic historical theory that follows the tradition of German romanticism as proposed by the Schlegel brothers. However, this study emphasizes the literary, not the ideological, character of this romanticism while it endeavors to reevaluate the influence of the decade of crisis of 1830 on Spanish romantic writers.