Quintana

The first global study of the life and work of Manuel José Quintana, the poet, playwright, historian and journalist who was also a royal tutor, a forerunner of public education and the initiator of liberal patriotism in Spain. He suffered exile and imprisonment while alive, and after death he was condemned to the greatest of forgetfulness. Quintana is today a complete stranger to the common Spaniards and his name barely appears in a few literary essays as the great poet and playwright that he was. However, hidden behind him beats a fascinating history of social and political struggle, in favor of his liberal idea of the homeland, which makes him a key figure in understanding that Spain of the s. XIX that absolutists and liberals disputed before the French threat. Trying to merge the indisputable dimension of the facts with that of a complex personality and a life path full of unknowns, Manuel Serrano rescues Quintana from the image of a cold, mannered and pompous neoclassical poet and discovers us for the first time, in a global study , the intellectual and human stature of a man who firmly believed in the need to commit himself to his time. A successful playwright, important historian, author of notable biographies and a pioneer of modern political journalism, due to his involvement he also worked as a civil servant, agreed to be a tutor and teacher to Queen Elizabeth II (who would crown him with laurel years later) and was decisive in the Development of public instruction in Spanish nineteenth century. For his denunciation of tyranny, his defense of freedom and the nation, and his demand for a liberal interpretation of our history, one of his fiercest enemies, Antonio de Capmany, described him as the patriarch of Spanish liberalism.