Key Movements and Authors in Literary History

Posted on Feb 2, 2025 in Latin

Bucolic Literature

Bucolic literature represents an idealized world of nymphs and shepherds that appeared in all the arts. Sannazaro’s Arcadia initiated the genre. Key features include:

  • Protagonists are pastors
  • Idealization of the landscape
  • Correspondence between landscape and mood
  • Mixed verse and prose
  • Stylized speech

Dante Alighieri

Dante was born into a noble family in Florence. A supporter of the Guelphs, he belonged to the exiled White Guelphs and was involved in political affairs. The Revelation of the Female Celestial: Dante fell in love with Beatrice and became obsessed. She died at age 25, and his unconsummated love inspired his New Life, a collection of poems dedicated to her. The Divine Comedy: The poet journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, guided by Virgil and Beatrice.

The Decameron

The Decameron is a collection of short stories from various sources that Boccaccio compiled into book form between 1349 and 1351. It far exceeds the genre of previous short story collections.

Elizabethan Theater

Elizabethan Theater spanned from the second to the last decades of the 16th century, with William Shakespeare as its most prominent figure. It was influenced by Italian and national historical traditions. It was a popular theater that did not respect the three unities and mixed comical tragedy with prose and verse. It ended in 1642.

Characteristics of Lope de Vega’s Theater

  • Contains three acts
  • Breaks the three unities
  • Mixes comedy and tragedy
  • Written in verse

Romanticism

Romanticism developed primarily in the first half of the 19th century. Key features include:

  • Awareness of self as an autonomous and fantastic entity
  • Primacy of the creative genius of a universe itself
  • Supremacy of feeling
  • Strong nationalistic tendencies
  • Liberalism
  • Originality
  • Creativity

The Latin American Boom

The Boom had two epochs: the first, a transition from the 19th to the 20th century towards modernism, and the second, in the 1960s, when its narrative extended throughout the world. After World War II, many people went to America, benefiting from cinematographic techniques. Surrealist language was used. In the 1960s, a new generation appeared that was considered representative of the New American Novel. They broke with realistic techniques, participated in literary competitions, published their books, gave lectures, served on literary juries, and wrote for the press.

Features of the Picaresque Novel

  • Represents the anti-heroic attitude
  • Dishonor
  • Low social origins
  • Thirst for social advancement
  • Parody of honor
  • Autobiographical accumulation of episodes
  • Service to several masters
  • Retrospective temporary design

Features of Literary Realism

  • Scientific analysis of reality
  • Intention of social reform
  • Plausibility of the arguments
  • Immediate reality of social problems
  • New characters
  • Precision, clarity, simplicity

Characteristics of the European Avant-Gardes

  • Simultaneous movements
  • Anti-traditionalism
  • Experimentation
  • Irrationalism
  • External world independent of elitism
  • The work is an end in itself

Realism

Realism was a bourgeois movement, the triumph of the current success of articles on manners, pamphlets, and novels. It led to translations of authors in a golden age in Spain, the height of the novel. Pre-realism played with the reality of motion, the conditioned character of social life, and manners, reflecting moral dualism. The consolidation of realism occurred after 1868. The decades of the 1880s and 1890s represent the triumph of realism and the development of naturalism.

Modernism

Modernism developed between 1880 and 1910. Key features include:

  • Rejection of everyday reality
  • An aristocratic attitude and a certain preciousness in style
  • The pursuit of beauty is achieved through very visual images
  • Both faithful to the great classical stanzas and metric variations on the molds
  • The use of mythology and sensationalism
  • A lexical renewal
  • Innovative desire aspiring to perfection
  • The adaptation of Castilian metric to Latin
  • The cult of formal perfection