18th Century Literature: Trends, Authors, and Characteristics
The eighteenth century is characterized by the replacement of the concepts of hierarchy, discipline, and dogmatic authority with equality, intellectual independence, and self-criticism. Its main features are:
- Rationalism: Reason is the primary basis of knowledge, allowing humans to develop scientific thinking, combat superstition, and critically review previous false beliefs.
- Reformism: Involves the development of society through government, laws, and proposals to reform various sectors, including the economy, education, and culture.
- Idealism: The belief that it is possible to achieve a more just and equal society.
- Didacticism: The knowledge of reality must be accompanied by disclosure to be useful to society as a whole. Essays and popular works are the genres most conducive to the proposed didacticism and utilitarianism.
Artistic and Literary Trends
A number of literary phenomena occurred in this century. They are grouped into three directions:
- Post-Baroque: The Baroque, reduced to an extravagant art without content, survived until mid-century, when the new neoclassical standard attacked it.
- Neoclassicism: The French influence in politics had an impact on the model of society. This fact, coupled with the depletion of Baroque culture, favored the emergence of Neoclassicism. It is formally correct but lacks emotion and spontaneity. The main rules described by the precepts are:
- The play must have a universal air of verisimilitude.
- It has to find the generic; the idea should be kept abstract.
- Style unit and the separation of the sexes, avoiding mixing the tragic with the comic, verse and prose, and the familiar with the high-pitched in the same work.
- The work must have a moral and educational purpose.
- Pre-Romanticism: The ideas of the Encyclopedia, so far from any sentimental effusions, were moving towards pre-Romantic emotion. Pre-Romanticism emerged as an aesthetic aimed at the sensitive and melancholy expression of feelings, justified as natural human impulses.
Authors
- Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo: His publications were controversial but enjoyed enormous prestige and royal protection. His most important work is contained in the eight volumes of Universal Critical Theater. His style is simple and natural, as his intent is more scientific than aesthetic teaching. His prose is precise, spontaneous, and without rhetorical devices.
- Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos: He was an observer of the Spanish reality of his time. His ideas are based on Enlightenment ideology. His production focuses on concern for the problems of Spain, among them: the material progress of the country (in the Report in the Record of the Land Act), public education, and cultural and political history (Memory in Defense of the Central Board). A didactic intention appears in his works.
- José Cadalso Vázquez: In his first prose work, The Pseudo-Intellectuals, he humorously attacks ornate and artificial erudition. His most important work is Moroccan Letters. It highlights the shortcomings of Spanish society through the epistolary genre. A pessimistic character can be seen in his work; Cadalso is characterized by a lack of confidence in man.