A Literary and Historical Overview of the 17th to 19th Centuries
Unit 5: The Seventeenth Century
The seventeenth century, with the exception of the parliamentary systems of England and the Netherlands, was dominated by the absolute monarchy of the European states. After the Thirty Years’ War, hegemony shifted to France, which replaced Spain’s dominance from the middle of the century, following the Peace of Westphalia. This political map generally correlated with philosophical rationalism (in the realms of absolutism) and empiricism (in England).
Another defining vector of seventeenth-century history is the conflict between the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and its consequence: the Baroque as an apologetic mechanism for absolutism. Also central is the importance and development of science, with highlighted figures such as Galileo, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Newton, despite persecution from the Church and absolutist power, primarily through the Holy Inquisition.
Two major dramatic figures are studied: Shakespeare, the culminating Elizabethan playwright who composed definitive works, and Moliere, the French playwright and maximum representative of comedy, both creators of characters and prototypes that became inescapable references in universal literature. Additionally, this unit presents a brief review of the most significant European literature. Thus, in English literature, metaphysical poetry stands out (with authors such as Donne, Milton, and Dryden). In France, the querelle of the ancients and moderns is highlighted, and the educational work of authors such as La Fontaine, Boileau, the narrative of Cyrano de La Fayette, and the comedies of Racine and Corneille, alongside the aforementioned Moliere, are commented upon. In Italy, there is a mention of the Marine lyric, prose fiction, and utopian fiction (Campanella). In Germany, the key is the incidence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, within which the work of Grimmelshausen stands out. In Portugal, we highlight the eloquent figure of Antonio Vieira.
Unit 6: The Eighteenth Century
The eighteenth century is the century of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment movement, with its array of proposals and critical insights, along with other socioeconomic factors, put an end to absolute monarchy and, ultimately, to the Old Regime. The enlightened, with their reformist tactics aimed at centralized absolutism, were ultimately overtaken by a revolutionary process, the French Revolution, which laid the foundations for the Contemporary Age.
From a cultural point of view, the Enlightenment, based on a rationalist conception, is the creation of the bourgeois ideology that aspires to political rights. To this end, it postulates a new look at politics and provides, in a critical spirit, answers to the demands and needs of the Third Estate.
Rejecting the dogmas of religion and combating ignorance, the Enlightenment linked education to the state as an indispensable tool for the dissemination of reason and the construction of a critical mass that leads forward, with optimism and hope, a transformation of the system. In this sense, the work of the Encyclopedia and the writings of the great Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, each in their degree, meet the theorization of social change. More reformist in the case of the first two cited thinkers, deeper and more radical in the case of the neoclassical Rousseau.
The cultural landscape, which takes Greco-Roman Antiquity as its reference model, is matched by a literature that reflects Enlightenment values. While in France, these are in fact the writings of great thinkers, in England the novel will stand out, with voices as important as Defoe, Swift, and Jane Austen.
But the world of the Enlightenment, with examples across Europe, both original and creatively mimetic in other cases, will know by the end of this century, particularly from Germany with the Sturm und Drang movement, the gestation of new aesthetic ideals, where reason is questioned and the subject will be seen through the lens of idealism and feelings. At the gates of Romanticism, doors will be opened by notorious figures such as Schiller and Goethe.
1. The Nineteenth Century (General)
1.1. Politics: Liberalism, constitutionalism, parliamentarism.
1.2. Economy and society: capitalism, socialism, anarchism.
1.3. Science: machinery, Darwinism.
1.4. Philosophy: Criticism, idealism, positivism, and vitalism.
2. Passage from Romanticism to Realism
This is the passage from subjectivism to objectivism, from sentimental value to the observation of the external world.
3. Literature and Society
The literature of the nineteenth century is addressed to the bourgeois class.
4. Development of Themes and Techniques
We move away from subjective and historical themes, and the novel of manners, towards themes drawn from the social context, the issues of the moment. The realist novel dominates the narration in the third person. The narrator is omniscient, and the structure is linear, with frequent changes of scene. Characters of the bourgeoisie and average class (the realist novel) or marginalized workers (the naturalistic novel) are portrayed. Characters become real pictures, with detailed descriptions of their physical, mental, and moral features. The preferred habitat of the bourgeoisie are refined settings, or the world of workers, but the naturalistic novel presents miserable and dramatic environments.
The style is sober and precise, given the musical style of Romanticism; prose, often neglected, is used to reflect the social reality of the characters. Hence the use of different registers, even slang and local jargon.
Given the society, the author presents a critical and analytical report of situations of injustice and vices of the bourgeois class. The novel is a weapon of social and political struggle, not a means of exaltation of the individual, country, or nation.
5. Authors
5.1. In France:
The most important French novelists of the time are realists: Henri Beyle (Stendhal), Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and the naturalists of the time, the Goncourt brothers Edmond and Jules, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Alphonse Daudet.
5.2. In England:
In England, the most important narrators of this time are: Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackeray, the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), and other authors who are unknown today because they are minor, although some novels have been brought to the cinema. These include Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope.
5.3. Russia
Realism has great Russian novelists such as Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy.
5.4. In Italy:
Among the most representative writers, we could mark Ippolito Nievo; Giuseppe Rovani, or Alfredo Oriani. The effort of these three authors is continued by Girolamo Rovetta; Luigi Capuano, and Giovanni Verga, and Carlo Dossi.
5.5. In Germany:
The only one that deserves mention is Theodor Fontane.
5.6. In Portugal:
In Portugal, we have to highlight the figures of Camilo Castelo Branco and José Maria Eça de Queiroz.
5.7. Brazil:
In Brazil, Manuel Antonio de Almeida, and, above all, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. In the second stage, writers stand out with a more realistic version close to nature (Arinos, Euclides da Cunha). This trend highlights the first third of the twentieth century with writers such as José Pereira da Graça Aranha.
5.8. In Spanish America:
Some of the most remarkable storytellers of the Hispano-American literature of the time are: the Chilean Alberto Blest Gana, Colombian Jorge Isaacs, Mexico’s Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Cuban Cirilo Villaverde, and Argentine Lucio Vicente López.
5.9. In Spain:
In Spain, the major novelists of realism, or realism of height, as it is preferred to call the naturalist time, are: Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero), José María de Pereda, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Juan Valera, Benito Pérez Galdós, and already in the heyday of realism: Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.
5.10. In Galicia:
In Galicia, the narrators of the late century are between Romanticism and Realism, as already pointed out at this time. Therefore, it is worth mentioning Marcial Valladares, Antonio López Ferreiro, Lamas Carvajal, or even Heraclio Pérez Placer.
6. The Female Characters in Some of the Most Representative Works
Many of the writers who wrote novels quoted by famous female characters, just remember titles like Madame Bovary, Sister Philomena, Little Dorrit, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Woman in White, Anna Karenina, Profiles of Women, Giacinta, Storia di una Donna, Eva, Effi Briest, Mary, The Prodigal Daughter, Traitor (starring Silda), Dona Luz, The House of Bernarda Alba, Genius and Figure (played by Raphael), Pepita Jiménez, Queen Martyr, The Regent’s Wife, Mercy, Marianela, Fortunata and Jacinta, or Maxine, or The Spurious Daughter. However, we did look at some of the characters who led the stories of science more relevant.
1. The Romantic Revolution: Historical Consciousness and a New Sense of Science
The most decisive historical events of the nineteenth century are:
a) The replacement of absolute monarchies with parliamentary systems.
b) The emergence of a new social class, the proletariat, which has its origin in industrial development.
c) The development of enormous technological and scientific advances.
d) The transformation of classicism and rationalism and individualism into irrationalism.
The main movements of this century in literature are: Romanticism, Realism, and Post-Romanticism.
The most notable features of this movement are: individualism, sentimentalism, idealism, and philosophical and political concerns.
2. Romantic Poetry
2.1. England
The Romantic period in England can be concentrated in the late eighteenth century. England in this period takes the decisive step towards world hegemony, for its powerful manufacturing and the victory over Napoleon.
English writers at the beginning, and stood in the majority side of the French Revolution, not without choices. England has always been a country that loved freedom. Hence there Romanticism was a movement continues.
Romanticism began in England about the same time in Germany.
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats are the poets par excellence of English Romanticism.
2.2. Germany
Romanticism appears in Germany in protest against French neoclassicism.
The German Romantic authors are of great artistic sensitivity and profound religious and philosophical thought, with vigorous musicality and great concern for aesthetics.
German Romanticism was not a unitary movement.
The dominant philosophers of German Romanticism were Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (the founders of German Idealism).
The poets who are best suited are Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg (Novalis), and Heinrich Heine.
2.3. France
French Romanticism, at first reactionary and anti-revolutionary, came to be seen, in 1830, in Victor Hugo, as the equivalent of liberalism, and then be followed by aesthetes and poets damned.
In poetic order, until the decade of 1830-1840, verse and theater are in France, the two major fields of literature: poetry in these years to give the novel to the fore, even trade, because there was a period in which some poets make much money with his verse.
In France, a traditionalist romanticism coexists, which evokes and defends Christianity, and a liberal romanticism of the encyclopedist type.
In French Romantic poetry, two trends should be distinguished: traditionalist and liberal.
Poets are traditionalists: De Maistre, De Bonald, Lacordaire, since Lamennais, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred Victor de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, and T. Gautier.
The most notable liberal poet would be Victor Hugo.
2.4. Italy
Italy is a creation of Romanticism: this new spirit, there, joins with the desire for national unity, which was reached in 1870.
In Italy, the Classical opposed much resistance to Romanticism. To such a point that this is a mere episode in the great tradition of classic Italian. With However, it had a marked patriotic character who helped in the process of reunification of the peninsula. The manifesto was romantic Italian Lettera semiseria of the Grisostomo Berchet (1816). Italian Romanticism has a strict classicist tone, especially in poetry. The featured poets are: Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi.
2.5. Russia
The pre-Romantic spirit appears in the lyric Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov (1718-1777), which is the first to sing reasons peasants.
The four major Romantic writers: Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky (1783-1852), Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873), and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814-1841).
2.6. In Portugal
Romanticism in Portugal comes from fatigue literature neoclassical and the influence of politicians returning from England and France.
Among the most remarkable Romantic poets are: Almeida Garrett and Alexandre Herculano.
2.7. Spanish America
Romanticism comes in Spanish America at the time of the struggles for independence. With all independent does not match the Romantic style: almost all the great poets of independence have a lot of classics.
How to transition to a new period of literature should be noted in Hispanoamérica the work of writers such as the Brazilian José Joaquim Fernandez de Lizardi (1776-1827), the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (1781-1865), and Ecuadorian José Joaquim de Olmedo (1780-1847). Crates poets Romantics are, however, the Cuban José María Heredia (1803-1839), and Argentine Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851).
2.8. Spain
Spain was the country for excellence and romantic several reasons
the romantic admire Spain: the Baroque literature, contact with the world
East, the Middle Ages, Christianity, the War of Independence.
Romanticism in Portugal led to the emergence of numerous
poets. These poets follow two guidelines: a historical-descriptive with
Universal Literature
Duque de Rivas, Zorrilla, Espronceda, Father Arolas, Ruiz Garcia Aguilera or
Tasso, and other intimate with Bécquer, Nicomedes Pastor Díaz and Carolina
Coronado. The Julian orillas in the Sar can be included in the latter
group.
2.9. In Sao Paulo
It was romantic love to the popular awakening in Sao Paulo
memory of the past and the desire to resurrect the literature in Galician. This
Movement will take the name of the Renaissance and is an attempt to recover the
Galician language and culture and Galician. Games floral and early edition
the publications of the Portuguese’s assumed the beginning of an activity
intended for this recovery, which had the primary responsibility to
precursors (Añón, Pintos, but Carvajal A) and as an outstanding figure in Rosalia,
Stalls and Pondal.