In this highly suggestive work, Philip Silver confronts and corrects the entire critical tradition of Spanish romanticism and suggests a new "restitutional" theory of that period in Spanish cultural and political history. For Silver, Spanish romanticism is exclusively a conservative affair, since in his view Spain missed the "high romanticism" that characterizes the writing of many European authors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Against the predominant belief in the existence of a liberal, progressive high romanticism in nineteenth-century Spain, Silver confirms the existence of a historical, conservative, politically interested romanticism.