Origins and Evolution of the Castilian Language
Castilian Origins
The Castilian language, also known as Spanish, originated from a combination of pre-Romanesque languages and Latin. It is a Romance language, with a majority of its vocabulary derived from Latin. Several factors influenced the development of Castilian:
- Germanic invasions in the 5th century
- Muslim invasion from the 8th to the 15th century
- Influence of Italian humanism in the 15th century
- Influence of French in the late 18th and 19th centuries
- Influence of Portuguese
- Influence of existing
Spanish Theater from Romanticism to the Late 20th Century
Romanticism (Late 18th – 19th Centuries)
Romanticism was a cultural and artistic movement that emerged in Germany and England between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and spread rapidly throughout Europe. It represented the beginning of modernity and laid the groundwork for the liberal state ideology of the bourgeois. Its moral characteristics are freedom (social, political, and artistic), subjectivism, historicism, irrationalism, and evasion.
The main themes were freedom, power and justice,
Read More20th Century Spanish Literature: Generation of ’98 & Avant-Garde
1. Historical Context of Spanish Literature
The late twentieth century witnessed the end of the so-called “Disaster of ’98” with the loss of Spain’s last colonies. This event had a profound impact on Spanish society and its literature.
2. Mentality of the Era
Writers of this period reflected the concerns of the era in their works. Literature served as a means of escape, or as a form of committed art that addressed individual, social, and political problems.
3. Spanish Literature (1898-1936)
Spanish literature
Read MoreSpanish Literature: Figures, El Cid, Lazarillo & La Celestina
Figures of Speech
Phonetic Figures
- Alliteration: Repetition of one or more phonemes in a verse.
- Anaphora: Repetition of a word at the beginning of successive verses or grammatical structures.
Syntactic Figures
- Pleonasm: Repetition of unnecessary words.
- Parallelism: Repetition of similar syntactic structures.
- Polysyndeton: Repetition of conjunctions.
- Epanalepsis: Begins and ends with the same word.
- Anadiplosis: Repeats at the beginning of a verse the word that ends the previous one.
Figures of Meaning
- Allegory:
Spanish Literature from Romanticism to Modernism
Romantic Poetry
Authors
Freed from the rigid Neoclassical expression, Romantic poetry maintained characteristic themes and introduced new developments regarding style: symbolic language, melancholy, impossible love.
Lyric Poetry
Authors express subjectivism in two stages:
- 1st half of the 19th century: patriotic and addressed social issues (Espronceda)
- 2nd half of the 19th century: poetry becomes more intimate (Bécquer and Rosalía)
Narrative Poetry
Reached its peak in the 1st half of the 19th century.
Read MoreTradition and Vanguard in Miguel Hernandez’s Poetry
Early Works (1925-1931)
Miguel Hernandez’s beginnings as a writer are consistent with those of an apprentice poet who, initially a follower of classical poetry, came to discover his own poetic voice. During this stage, he carefully observed elements of the landscape and nature, admiring poets like Gabriel Miró, Ramón Sijé, Vicente Medina, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, and Pedro Salinas. His friend Ramón Sijé introduced him to the classics, and the canon of the Cathedral of Orihuela
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