20th Century Spanish Literature: Key Writers and Themes
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Life
Born in Huelva, Juan Ramón Jiménez was a highly sensitive individual given to melancholy from childhood. The death of his father, his loneliness, and his love of painting marked his literary production. He married Zenobia Camprubí, and as a poet, was exiled to Puerto Rico and taught at the university. Due to his excessive sensitivity, he suffered several depressions and never recovered from the loss of his wife. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956.
Work
He dedicated his life to poetry. Criticism divides his work into three parts:
- Modernist, sensitive stage: Heavily influenced by symbolism, musicality, and color.
- Stage of consolidation: More analytical, he begins the search for poetry that essentially reflects a poet’s diary, recently married.
- Enough stage: His writing fully develops as a total way of thinking and expressing the world. He expresses his religious experiences and melts with God. Synesthesia, careful language, and free verse are characteristic of this stage.
Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Life
Ramón del Valle-Inclán was a writer of strong reputation with an extravagant personality, both in his physical appearance and his sharp wit. From Galicia, he studied law and participated in the country’s journalistic life. He emigrated to America, where he cultivated his mind among the harshest critics. His opposition to Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship landed him in jail. Theatrical efforts took root in his marriage with Josefina Blanco. Valle lived the bohemian literary life with much hunger, hardship, and need. His critical spirit led him to be immersed in different fights. He died in 1936, the year the Spanish Civil War began.
Work
In Valle-Inclán’s work, we can differentiate two stages:
- 1st stage: The author evades reality and seeks ideal beauty, thus being a modernist writer in his aesthetic second stage.
- 2nd stage: The author is faced with a reality that he does not like, and therefore deforms it to better show it. Thus, the esperpento is born. (Esperpento is the systematic deformation of reality. The characters are grotesque, the actions are rough, the language is deformed with local slang. The work that best reflects this technique is Luces de Bohemia.)
Theater
Valle-Inclán extensively cultivated prose works such as Sonatas, The Iberian Arena, or Tyrant Banderas, using color that appealed to all the senses, but he was above all a man of the theater. Luces de Bohemia, Barbaric Comedies, or Divine Words are part of his famous plays. His conception of theater as total art contrasts with that of his contemporaries. In Luces de Bohemia, the protagonist Max Estrella criticizes the society of the time by drawing on the streets of Madrid.
Antonio Machado
Life
Born to bourgeois parents, Antonio Machado studied at an institution of free education. He obtained his baccalaureate in 1900. With his sister, he went to work in Paris at a publishing house. When he returned to Spain, he published Soledades (40 poems), with a focus on the self. Four years later, he published Soledades, Galerías y Otros Poemas, a more moderate modernist work. In 1907, he prepared for a French teaching position and obtained a post in Soria, where he met Leonor (14 years old) and they married. In 1911, he received a scholarship and went to Paris to take courses in philology and philosophy. Leonor fell ill and died of tuberculosis in 1912 in Soria. Machado published Campos de Castilla, reflecting his depression. He tried to return to Paris but was sent to Baeza and then to Madrid. He obtained a degree in philosophy and became a philosophical writer. From 1912 to 1932, he lived in Segovia. He met Pilar de Valderrama, with whom he maintained a relationship until the war. He published Nuevas Canciones (1924) and From an Apócrifo Songbook (1926). In 1927, he prepared to enter the Royal Spanish Academy. From 1934, he collaborated with the press in the Journal of Madrid and El Sol. In 1932, he worked at an institute in Madrid. His brother was obligated to support Franco. Machado was a Republican. He moved with his mother to Valencia, then to Barcelona, and finally crossed the border at Portbou. His mother died, and he followed three days later.
Writers of the 20th Century
In the late nineteenth century, the influx of Hispanic American modernism led to a more intimate literature among Spanish writers. A number of writers and intellectuals began producing texts that reflected their philosophical concerns and reflections on the reality of the country.
The most prominent writers are: Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Azorín, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán.
Topics
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-Spain: in the last decades of the nineteenth century Spain was undergoing a profound political and social crisis, which culminated with the loss of the colonies (Cuba Puerto Rico and Philippines). React to this and reflected in his writings on the causes of decline. Later the Spanish idealized landscapes and reflected positively d castilla, history and classical literary and artistic works.
-Existence: sore poured in their texts and personal reflections on the dewstino of man and the meaning of life. Death over time religion and the meaning of life were the themes. For plasma, was an expression neesario an employee states: not looking for the ornament, but opted for the simplicity and rigor.