Galician Romantic Literature: 19th Century Revival
Romantic Galician Literature
Given what happened in the 19th century, writers did not use the native language except in certain cases where there was bilingualism. The work of most writers denotes Castilian-speaking Galicians, environmentally or directly, the presence of Galicia.
Background of 19th Century Romantic Galician Literature
Galician literature’s starting point is what we call Rexordimento, a term that notes the resurgence or revival of Galician literary genius in the past, after a long period of dormancy. Indeed, after the last trobadores or singers, Juan Rodriguez de Padrón or Archdeacon of Toro, these trobadores‘ literature joined a 400-year period of literary creation that was done in Castilian.
Serial Novel
The most-read literature in literature and journalism included brochures and flyers in the papers. Very few samples of this serial literature have been preserved, but you cannot deny their linguistic and documentary value.
Rosalía de Castro
With Rosalía, Galician literature recovers its prestige. Her purpose is obvious today: to encourage youth in the cultivation of poetry and the history of Galicia. Writing in Galician at that time was suicide because the Galician language was marginalized and almost forgotten. Thus, we see how Rosalía de Castro is motivated by something deep, intimate, and individual. She feels the need to sing to her land and the awkwardness of her contemporaries. She takes to claim a language rather than a dialect. She intends to show landscape and customs. She uses the muñeira verse of 4 syllables, called tonic and atonic, with no wobble.
She uses the romance of 5, 6, 7, and 8 syllables, also triads (3) and seguidillas (6). Major art-heroic verse in stanzas ABABABCC: used for epic composition descriptions.
Romantic Theater
Ends in tragedy.
Characteristics
- The basic theme is passionate, doomed to failure because it conflicts with social norms.
- The defense of adultery or suicide for love caused great controversy with the romantic classicists, who accused it of immorality and corruption of youth.
- The Romantics wanted to move the audience, not to raise it.
This coincides with the medieval conflict or places society in a distant era of the 19th century.
The Romantic dramatists mixed verse and prose, but in the last stage, verse is required.
Romantic Writers
- Duque de Rivas: With his work Don Alvaro, or the Force of Destiny, this author definitely breaks with neoclassicism. He does not follow the rule of three unities of place, space, and time, as it takes place over several years and in different places, mixing the tragic and the comic.
- José Zorrilla: Don Juan Tenorio reshapes the myth of Don Juan so that it becomes the most popular figure in literature.
Romantic Theater, Second Half of the 19th Century
The romantic drama by José Echegaray had enormous success with works like The Great Galeoto. He received the Nobel Prize in 1904. The work has a contemporary atmosphere and moralizing intention. This theater is known as high comedy.