As the editor, Paulino Garagorri, points out, the text here translated was essentially a transcription of two cycles of lectures that Ortega gave. Clearly they were delivered, as was his custom, from notes based on the intricate filing system that he used. Thus the resulting text was the record of an oral, extempore presentation from scant notes, with one or two passages read from printed or written works.

In this highly suggestive work, Philip Silver confronts and corrects the entire critical tradition on Spanish romanticism and suggests a new -restitutional- theory of that period in Spanish cultural and political history.