Politics, romanticism and masculinity: Tassara (1817-1875)

Abstract

A biographical approach is used in this article to inquire into some cultural keys of political action. The life of Tassara, a Spanish «civic» poet of the mid Nineteenth Century, is turned into the starting point for the analysis of the relationship between liberal politics and two other different but complementary cultural identities: Romanticism and masculinity. Both identities conditioned the ways in which this deputy, diplomatic and public writer thought and acted in politics, during the instauration of the representative regime in Spain. Our contextual biographical approach also aims at assessing how far Tassara’s was a singular case and how much he shared with the post-revolutionary liberal generation he belonged to. In the latter sense, his double condition of Romantic and male build up a set of identity references that might contribute to undertake the study of political liberalism from a transnational point of view.