The Generations of ’27 and ’98: Literary Movements in Spanish History
The Generation of ’27
The Generation of ’27, named in honor of Góngora who was celebrated in 1927, is one of the most important literary generations in Spanish literary history. It is primarily a generation of poets, except for Federico García Lorca who developed the theater with great brilliance; the best of the work of the rest is in their poetry.
The Generation of ’27 has a first stage prior to 1936 in which almost all members run on parallel tracks. This generation, echoing many currents, cultivates leadership in its various versions: ultraism and creationism with Gerardo Diego, Futurism at Cal y Canto with Alberti, Surrealism in Lorca’s Poet in New York, Cernuda’s A River, A Love, Aleixandre’s Espadas como labios. Salinas and Guillén lean toward a pure poetry, purified of everything that is not emotion, lyric voice due to you in the first or the second Cántico.
Also growing in these early stages is neopopulism with Alberti’s poetry with Sailor on Land, and Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. They also include either a classic root poetry inspired by Garcilaso, Lope, and Góngora as Human Verses by Gerardo Diego.
After the war, the trajectory of these poets is quite different. Lorca is dead, Alberti, Cernuda, Guillén, and Salinas are in exile, the last two die in it. They continue to write poetry away from the enthusiasm of its early hours. For Guillén, there is time for Clamor, Salinas hopes to return sometime in The Confident, Alberti’s melancholy tinged Baladas y canciones del Paraná, and Cernuda is obsessed with the end in A Few Hours or Despair of the Chimera.
Dámaso Alonso, who before the war had cultivated poetry only tangentially, in 1944 publishes Sons of Wrath which, together with Shadow of Paradise by Vicente Aleixandre, constitute a turning point in postwar poetry and have a decisive influence on the poets of succeeding generations.
The Generation of ’98
We define the Generation of ’98 in a comprehensive manner, as a group of writers, thinkers, scientists, artists, and so on, who are deeply affected by the crisis of the late nineteenth-century values and who believe that the 1898 war and the loss of the last remnants of what had been the Spanish empire, is an appropriate time for moral regeneration, social, and cultural development.
In this sense, doctors and scientists like Santiago Ramón y Cajal, historians like Ramón Menéndez Pidal, painters like José Gutiérrez Solana, or writers like Miguel de Unamuno are part of the Generation of ’98.
The writers of the Generation of ’98 are interested in the formal renewal of the proponents of modernist art, but differ from them because they seek a simple and anti-rhetorical style, renew and enrich the language with neologisms, but prefer to retrieve traditional Castilian lexical fallen into disuse, to introduce the many exotic words, sound, cosmopolitan, found in any modernist text.
If modernism in poetry is its most representative literary genre, the group of ’98 cultivated prose, the novel, and especially the essay, as an appropriate genre to vent their concerns.
Two issues are of concern primarily to this generation: the issue of Spain and the meaning of human life.
The Issue of Spain
The reflection on what Spain is, the reasons for its continuing decline since the seventeenth century, are issues of long tradition in Spanish literature, from the Baroque writers as Baltasar Gracián or Saavedra Fajardo, illustrated as the Gallows or Jovellanos, or romantic as Larra.
Unamuno is part of the group of intellectuals who seek to get Spain out of its progressive collapse without recourse to political solutions. At first, as can be seen in his essay Around Purity, he believes that false patriotism, militarism, bad politicians, and intellectuals’ negligence have caused the decline of Spain, opening it up to Europe can find a solution and conserving the best Spanish root, which lasts over common men whose daily work is marking the passage of history, what he called the intrahistory. Unamuno later rejected that openness to Europe and in another essay Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, praises the gentleman from La Mancha as a paradigm of moral values and spiritual rationalism versus European Spanish.
Azorín in his earlier writings also makes a sharp critique of contemporary Spain. Azorín, the character who stars in his novels, Antonio Azorín or Will, is distressed to find a meaning to life and the moral and social misery that he perceives around him. He believes that anarchism would be the quickest way to achieve social justice. Azorín mitigates its ideology rather from Confessions of a Little Philosopher, when he believes that only education and culture would make possible the reforms that Spain needed.
Pío Baroja pours his concern for Spain in his novels, especially in The Search, the first of the trilogy The Struggle for Life. It presents a terrible image of the social reality of their time, those fighting for life from the stream, denouncing corruption, injustice, and selfishness of Spanish society.
The Meaning of Human Life
When asked about the meaning of life and not finding answers, these writers live a deep life crisis and existential. They have overcome the traditional religion, have been profoundly influenced by the first existentialist philosophers, and have separated from Catholic orthodoxy.
Unamuno is torn between the impossibility of reconciling faith and reason, the desire to believe in immortality, and the heartbreaking idea that after death, there is nothing. Unable to use reason to get satisfactory answers, he resorts to irrationalism Reason is the enemy of life will end by saying. These issues are discussed in his essays The Tragic Sense of Life, The Agony of Christianity in his novels San Manuel Bueno Martir, Fog, or some play as The Past Returns.
Baroja’s answer to the meaning of life is to deny it, life is meaningless, the strong always triumphs over the weak, who must fight ever, but knows that the struggle is doomed to failure. In this regard, The Tree of Knowledge is Baroja’s novel more immersed in the existential flow.
Another aspect that is clearly noventaiochista is Castile and admiration for his austere landscape, which provide a subjective manner and reflect more realistically land and people, he projected in his own mind, Castilla de Azorín or Overland Trip from Portugal and Spain de Unamuno, are books that respond to this trend.
Besides Unamuno, Azorín, and Baroja, are included in this literary generation Valle and Antonio Machado. The aesthetics of the Sonatas by Valle place him about the budgets of modernism, the hardness and sarcasm of his grotesques or Iberian Ruedo novels go much further in his fierce criticism of the social and political situation of his time that the most reformers postulates the Generation of ’98. The interest rates and Castilian landscape, social criticism of some poems Campos de Castilla by Machado come close to this group but differs from them by the symbolist intimacy Solitudes, Galleries of Other Poems, the popular New Songs and poems by Machado militants in civil war, where the circumstances showed. 98 ideas had been largely overtaken by events that triggered the civil war of 36.