15th-Century Spanish Literature: Genres and Characteristics
15th-Century Spanish Literature
Literary Genres
Old Ballads
Revitalizes the epic and enriches the courtly tradition.
Popular-Traditional Narrative Poetry
- Old Ballads: Short, epic lyric compositions derived from the fragmentation of songs of gesta.
- Evolution and Transmission: Initially transmitted orally, later collected by authors in songbooks and romanceros.
- New Artistic Ballads: Composed by poets like Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, and Lope de Vega.
- Themes: Historical-national, romantic, lyrical, border, Moorish, Carolingian, and Breton.
- Metrics: Closely related to epic poems, using sixteen-syllable verses divided into two hemistichs of eight syllables each. Odd and even verses are free and assonant.
- Style: Features typical of oral epic poetry, including abrupt beginnings and endings, repetition, and the use of the imperfect subjunctive, conditional, and imperfect indicative.
Cultured Lyric Poetry
- Poetry of Songs: Diverse topics compiled in songbooks by court poets.
- Themes: Love, moral reflection, and satire.
- Love: Follows the Provençal tradition, spiritualizing the meaning of love. Characteristics include bookishness, verbal allegories, personifications of ideas, emotional isolation, and improvisation.
- Moral Reflection: Representative work is Songs for the Death of His Father by Jorge Manrique. Didactic and moral in nature, using the Manriqueña couplet structure.
- Satire: Political anarchy and moral corruption fostered satirical poetry, both social and political.
Prose and Novel
Humanistic Prose
- The humanistic tendency is intensified by the diffusion of classical culture.
- Genres include biographies and political and satirical chronicles.
Loving and Sentimental Novel
- Steeped in the sentimentality of courtly love.
- Novels of adventure, chivalry, and history (drawing from epic poems and chronicles).
- Characters and settings often reflect courtly society.
Theater
- Reborn with two pieces of lyrical poems by Gómez Manrique, dramatized into short plays.
- Courtly theater, linked to the nobility and detached from popular reality.
- Two forms: religious and secular (pastoral, love, and humanistic themes).
- La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas.
La Celestina
- 21 acts.
- Dramatic action with a prologue and two parts.
- Themes: Love, greed, luck, magic, time, death, and the social world.
- Reflects the transformation of medieval society: new social relationships (economic), new moral codes (consciousness of individuality, desire for liberty, pursuit of personal profit).