Spanish Literature of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Romanticism to the 60s

Posted on Sep 22, 2024 in Latin

Spanish Literature of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Romanticism

General Characteristics

Romanticism celebrates the world of the senses, using literary figures like synesthesia. The language is sensual with an abundance of adjectives, embellishing the language and giving rise to new literary genres such as articles of customs and legends (based on real events). Romanticism can be considered a revolutionary period.

Romantic Poetry

In the first half of the 19th century, the poetic works of Romantic writers fall into two types: lyric and narrative.

  • Lyric Poetry: Characterized by subjectivity, the poet pours their feelings and emotions into the poem. Themes include the desire for freedom, nature as a reflection of the poet’s soul, disorder, ruins, darkness, and cliffs. Love is an abundant theme, alongside religious, historical, legendary, and afterlife themes. Various meters and stanzas are used in the same poem, with a frequent pursuit of rhythmic effects. The use of wide metrics and experimentation with new stanza schemes exemplifies the Romantic poet’s freedom of form.
  • Narrative Poetry: Tells a story, often with a focus on adventure, romance, or historical events.

Major Romantic Authors

José de Espronceda
  • High imaginative capacity and mastery of polymetry and rhythm.
  • Short Poems:
  • Song of the Pirate: Romantic rebellion and protest against conformist society.
  • Student of Salamanca: Full of Romantic features.
  • The Devil World: A philosophical poem exploring man’s existence and the meaning of life.
The Duke of Rivas
  • The Moor Foundling: Dramatic intensity.
  • Historical Romances: Based on medieval and 16th-century stories.
  • Legends: Great variety of metrics.
  • Don Alvaro or the Force of Fate: A play in 5 acts, mixing prose with verse, breaking the three classical unities, with dynamic action and Romantic settings and characters.
José Zorrilla
  • East: Exotic themes.
  • Legends: Written in different metrics and based on traditional themes.
  • Granada: An incomplete poem about the Moorish king of Granada.
  • The Shoemaker and the King: About the figure of Peter I.
  • Don Juan Tenorio: The author takes the protagonist from Tirso de Molina’s play, The Trickster of Seville.
Mariano José de Larra
  • Articles of Manners: Describes the ways of life with a critical and pessimistic tone.
  • Political Articles: Progressive and liberal ideology.
  • Articles of Literary Criticism:
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
  • Rhymes: Brief poems with an intimate tone and simpler verse than previous Romantic poetry.
  • From My Cell: Epistolary literature on art, life, and landscape.
  • Legends: Short stories about legendary and exotic themes, transporting the reader to a world of terror and mystery.
Rosalía de Castro
  • Cantares Gallegos: Written in Galician, describes life in Galicia with a nostalgic vision.
  • Follas Novas: Written in Galician, denounces social injustice in Galicia.
  • On the Banks of Sar: Written in Castilian, a painful and bitter piece of poetry.

Theater of the 1930s

Introduction

During the first third of the 20th century, commercial theater flourished. The bourgeois middle class enjoyed the works of two great figures of national drama: Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and Federico García Lorca.

Considerations on the Theatrical Event

  • Theater requires representation on stage to reach the fullness of communication.
  • The conservatism of the public, the low artistic bias, and business censorship explain the lack of originality in the theater of the first third of the 20th century. Three Hats by Miguel Mihura had to wait until 1952 to be staged, despite being written in 1932.

Successful Theater

The Bourgeois Comedy

Also known as Benaventine comedy, after Jacinto Benavente. This comedy features high-class characters and conflicts typical of this class: sporadic marital infidelities, heartbreak, rebellious children, hypocrisy, and gossip. Vested Interests is a representative work.

The Poetic Drama

Characterized by musical and sonorous language, exotic environments, and dramatic and rhetorical gestures. Eduardo Marquina and Francisco Villaespesa offered a nostalgic look at the past with works like The Daughters of the Cid and In Flanders, the Sun Has Set. Marquina also wrote works with rural settings and lyrical influence, anticipating Lorca.

The Sainete

Carlos Arniches, not forgetting humor, proposed a crude look at aspects of Spanish society also addressed by the Generation of ’98: despotism, immorality of leaders, and social injustice. Miss Trévelez is a notable work. Pedro Muñoz Seca wrote Don Mendo’s Revenge, which ridiculed modernist historical dramas.

Innovative Theater

Novecentist Theater

The attempt to renew theater is attributed to Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who wrote several plays, the best known being The Average People, whose theme is the void in search of its identity, a pure metaphor. Manuel Azaña is another author of this period.

The Generation of ’27

Rafael Alberti excelled in political theater with works like The Monstrosity and Night of War in the Prado Museum. Pedro Salinas cultivated the short play. Max Aub combined historical commitment with an approach to the main concerns of human beings under political conditions, as seen in The Mirror of Greed and Valverde Street.

Ramón María del Valle-Inclán

One of the most important playwrights of all time and the most important of the 20th century in Castilian. His works include dramatic poems, sound poems, and plays with a medieval atmosphere (April Story). He also wrote esperpentos, a genre he created, characterized by grotesque features and a critique of social classes and institutions, such as the aristocracy, the military, the monarchy, and the high bourgeoisie. Bohemian Lights and Divine Words are examples of this genre. His works often feature allusions to historical figures and a preference for miserable, marginal, and degraded environments.

Federico García Lorca

Conflict between authority and freedom: The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife.

Surrealist influence: The Public.

Cycle of tragedies: Works focused on the role of women, with a strong dramatic tone and romantic dissatisfaction: Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba, and Yerma.

General characteristics:

  • Search for total entertainment.
  • Combines verse and prose, religion and folk elements, and music.
  • Focuses on a popular audience.
  • Oppressive environments that influence the freedom of the central characters: the people, the city.
  • Simple and direct language, full of lyricism.

The Generation of ’27

The Generation of ’27 refers to a group of Spanish poets and intellectuals who rose to prominence around the year 1927, the tercentenary of Luis de Góngora’s death. They maintained close relationships and collaborated in various magazines. Their poetry was influenced by avant-garde movements, characterized by elaborate language, pure poetry, a departure from sentimentality, a desire for beauty, and poetic playfulness, with a strong use of metaphor. They also cultivated tradition, popular themes, and classic Castilian metrics (free verse, ballad, sonnet), showing the influence of Bécquer.

Authors of the Generation of ’27

Luis Cernuda
  • Themes of love, sadness, and nonconformity.
  • Simple and colloquial language.
  • Use of eclogue, elegy, and ode.
  • Works: Forbidden Pleasures, Where Oblivion Dwells.
Pedro Salinas
  • Love poetry.
  • Precise, sober, and reflective style.
  • Works: The Voice Due to You in Life.
Jorge Guillén
  • Pure poetry, intellectual and elaborate.
  • Works: Cántico (grouping poems under the titles Song, Clamor, and Be).
Vicente Aleixandre
  • Very broad, deep, and profound verse.
  • Themes of destruction, love, and the history of the heart.
  • Later works: Dialogues of Knowledge.
Gerardo Diego
  • Varied poetry, sometimes avant-garde, sometimes more traditional.
  • Works: Image, Manual of Foams (avant-garde); Ballads of the Bride (traditional).
Dámaso Alonso
  • Small output, but with significant lyrical meaning.
  • Works: Children of Wrath, Man and God.
Rafael Alberti
  • Popular vein, surrealist and avant-garde poetry, and committed verse.
  • Works: Sailor Ashore (with a background of sadness and memory of the sea), About Angels (surrealist), The Poet in the Street (social and political).
  • Theater: Night of War in the Prado Museum, The Monstrosity (premiered in Buenos Aires).
Miguel Hernández
  • Not part of the Generation of ’27, but considered an epigone.
  • Poetry centered on human beings, with conceptual and existential themes.
  • Works: The Ray that Doesn’t Stop (full of imagery), Wind of the People, Songbook and Ballads of the Bitter Man (shows absences caused by the Spanish Civil War).
Federico García Lorca (Poetry and Theater)
  • Poetry: Exceptional popular spirit and use of traditional forms.
  • Works in octosyllabic meters: Book of Poems (early work with modernist influence), Gypsy Ballads (recreates the Gypsy world, blending harsh and cultic elements, with surrealist influences).
  • Poem of the Cante Jondo: Shows the roots of Andalusian song and its tragic spirit.
  • Poet in New York: Inspired by the city’s atmosphere, uses free verse and prose, with visionary imagery.
  • Theater: Tragic and lyrical works with popular elements. Themes of vital frustration, impossible love condemned to pain, death, and frustrated motherhood. Women play an important role.
  • Works: The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife (farce), Mariana Pineda (historical drama).

Rooted Poetry

: degrees often theTradition in style and versification, avoiding the sadness of the moment. Findings of SONNET.
· Language serene, classic and distant. · Topics: Country, God, religion, national issues … · Authors: José García Nieto, Luis Rosales (The house is on), JM Pemán, Ridruejo (Sonnets to the stone)
Uprooted: Reference: Poetry of Cesar Vallejo 27
· Topics: It is a commitment to existentialism and history and serves to relieve their concerns.
· Authors: Damaso Alonso (Hijos de la ira), Vicente Aleixandre …
“Poetry simple and committed, motivated by the situation in the country, denounces human suffering. It is addressed to the group. “Said Gabriel Celaya with Cantos Iberians. , Blas de Otero very expressive and sound poetry and poetic language and elaborate use of phonics resources. Ance which seeks God and I pray that peace and the word addressed to the vast majority.
José Hierro has a dense and Trafficking word love, memory, poetry … Works: How I know me and New York Notebook.

Poetry 60: Poetry criticism · less dramatic tone language more carefully.
• In times: Humor and Irony. form of personal experience (subjectivism). Evoke childhood.
· Authors – Jaime Gil de Biedma satirical. Ex: Posthumous Poems. “With critical Gonzalez, ironic complaint Rough intimate poetry world. – Carlos Barral. – Gamoneda not included in this generation but it is contemporary. Age.
– Rodriguezshow emotion for land and landscape and is love, truth-seeking, solidarity … Almost a legend.
– Félix Grande.