Golden Age Spanish Literature: Key Authors and Works
Manners and the Novel
Manners reflect environments and characters. The novel’s rates are descriptive and picturesque, abundant with humor and social satire. It may have didactic or moralizing intent, represented by figures like Red and Luis Velez de Guevara.
Picaresque Novel
This narrative initiates the movement toward realism and inaugurated the picaresque novel genre, flourishing in the 16th and 17th centuries. Narrators such as Matthew Vicente Espinel and works like Buscon, Estebanillo Gonzalez, and Quevedo solidify this genre. The picaresque novel is characterized by:
- First-person narrative: The main character recounts their life (a false autobiography).
- Open narrative structure: Events described are realistic.
- Disgraceful origins: The rogue’s parents lack honor.
- Lack of social mobility: The rogue does not improve their status.
- Immoral actions: The rogue is a victim of their own actions.
- Moralistic tones: Some works are appreciated for their moralistic undertones.
Góngora: Ballads and Sonnets
Ballads and Romances
Góngora’s ballads and letrillas are thematically diverse, displaying vivacity, beauty, grace, and charm. He does not renounce expressiveness or artifice in his style. In his ballads, the author deals with many themes: love, burlesque.
Sonnets
Góngora also wrote cultivated sonnets, including love poems and heartbreak compositions. His sonnets are perfect and sometimes complicated in structure, showcasing formal perfection and culteranismo. The lyrical poet seeks the creation of a distinct poetic language, utilizing violent hyperbatons, lengthy statements, and metaphors. His bright and colorful poetry is complex.
Poetry for Adults
Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea
Composed of 63 octavas reales, Góngora’s work, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tells the story of the Cyclops Polyphemus in love with Galatea and his murder of the shepherd Acis. The nymph Galatea turns Acis into a river. The myth, appearing in the Odyssey, is recreated in Spanish Renaissance and Italian poetry. The theme brings out the contrasts and shadows of the Baroque period, evident in Góngora’s language.
Solitudes
The plot is minimal, beginning with the arrival of a castaway. Góngora poured his most elaborate and exuberant language into these verses, characteristic of his culterano production. Dedicated to the Duke of Béjar, it remains incomplete. Góngora intended to restructure the poem into four parts but only wrote two, leaving the last unfinished.
Quevedo: Poetic Works
Poetry
Quevedo’s richness of expression, thematic variety, wit, ingenuity, and sensitivity make him one of the most relevant Spanish lyrical poets.
Love Poetry
These poems adhere to the conventions of amatory lyric beauty and language, infused with feeling and emotion that transcends literary topics.
Metaphysics
Quevedo’s metaphysical poetry covers topics such as anguish, disappointment, resignation, and the fleeting nature of life.
Moral and Satire
Quevedo’s moralistic attitude criticizes and satirizes human foibles. His satirical poetry is unmatched, displaying inexhaustible wit and acuity in mocking and criticizing grotesque distortions. He treats serious and important subjects with triviality, alluding to 17th-century characters, writers, literary issues, myths, historical figures, and literary heroes.
Prose
Dreams
Consisting of five Sueños, later reprinted under the title Juguetes de la niñez, this work offers a critique of manners and vices, parading varied and burlesque characters. Quevedo uses wit and language to perfection.
Buscon
Considered his best prose work and the culmination of the picaresque novel, Quevedo masterfully narrates a series of episodes and misfortunes of the protagonist, Don Pablos. Pablos is a rogue created by Quevedo, a puppet in the author’s hands. Quevedo showcases his mastery of language and style, creating a play on the Spanish rogue archetype.