Golden Age Prose: Lazarillo de Tormes, Origins of Castilian Lexicon, and Literary Realism
The Prose in the Golden Age
The prose in the Golden Age: The most important narrative contribution of the 16th century is the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). It is an autobiographical novel where the protagonist is a child of poor parents, a vagabond character who goes from one place to another.
Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)
The author is anonymous, and the novel recounts his life in the first person across seven chapters.
Argument
The work is divided into seven treatises and is a first-person account of the history of Lazaro Gonzalez Perez, a boy of humble origins, born in the Tormes River in Salamanca. Like the great hero Amadis, he was orphaned by his father, a thieving miller named Tome Gonzalez, and was placed in service to a blind man by his mother, Antona Perez, a free woman with a black man, Zaide, who gives him a mulatto brother. Between Lazarillo’s “fortunes and adversities,” Lazarus evolves from his initial simplicity to develop a survival instinct. He is awakened to the evil of the world by the goring of a stone bull, a lie with which the blind man takes him out of his simplicity. Then, his cunning rivals the celebrated blind man at various events such as grapes and a jug of wine (a classical narrative model) until he comes back at another stone butt lying, which is worth the cruel blind busts into a pillar.
Origins of Castilian Lexicon and Cultism
The oldest Spanish vocabulary consists of a small group of pre-Roman linguistic fossils, particularly Basque (left), Iberian (mud, thatch, plaster, fat, wrist, even some anthroponym as Indalecio) and Celtic, either through the Gallo (birch, lark, pants, cabin, road, shirt, carpenter, car, beer league, saya, vassal), but mainly through Latin (heather, dash, boot, watercress, hook, entanglement, silt, slab, serna), because the Romans conquered Hispania in the year 206 BC and held it for centuries. So it is a Romance language, romance or neo-Latin, derived from the Vulgar Latin (not the Latin worship) spoken by more common people in the county of Castile. |
A cultism is a word whose morphology follows very closely its etymological origin—Greek or Latin—without following the changes that the evolution of the Castilian tongue followed from its origins in Vulgar Latin. Reintroduced into the language by cultural considerations, literary or scientific, the cultism fits just as the phonological and orthographic conventions established by linguistic evolution, but ignores the transformations suffered roots and morphemes in the development of the Romance language.
Theater: Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega, also known as “The Phoenix of Wits”, author of some 1,500 plays, novels, epic poems and narrative poetry and several collections of poetry profane, religious and humorous. Lope stood out as a consummate master of the sonnet. Their contribution to universal theater was mostly a marvelous imagination, who exploited his contemporaries and successors withdrawing Spanish and European themes, arguments, reasons and all sorts of inspiration. Its theater, polymers, breaks with the units of action, place and time, and also with the style, mixing the tragic and the comic. She described her peculiar drama in his art to new comedies at that time (1609). Relaxed the traditional rule of Aristotelianism to fit your time and thus opened the doors to the renewal of drama. He also created the cast of the call swashbuckling comedy.
Polysemy
Polysemy: Words that have multiple meanings.
Homonimia
Homonimia: Words that are written differently and sound alike.
a-5
b-6
c-7
d-1
e-2
f-8
g-4
h-3
The Origin of European Literary Realism
The origin of European literary realism is to be found in medieval Spanish literature and the Spanish picaresque novel, in particular, in the version on that tradition that shaped the novelist Miguel de Cervantes. The model demystifies Cervantes strongly influenced later European literature, but which became discredited for writing fiction in the eighteenth century European influence postponed until well into the nineteenth century Except in the case of England, who in the eighteenth century realism began his own hand of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and much of later realist writers are indebted.
Naturalism
Naturalism is Realism taken to extremes. Based on the scientific method and determinism, it frequently resorted to unusual or unpleasant environments, characters also unusual and a strict application of scientific method.