Art Nouveau and Modernism in Spanish Literature: The Generation of ’98
Tema4
l Art Nouveau and Modernism:
Art movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Modernism is the term that designates a stream of artistic renewal developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to different countries, received several names:
The Generation of ’98 is the name that has been traditionally grouped with a group of writers, poets, essayists and Spanish that were deeply affected by the moral crisis and social policy brought about in Spain by the military defeat in theHispano-American War and the consequent loss of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. All authors and great poets included within this generation born between1864 and 1876. They were inspired by the stream of criticism of Canovas called regenerationism and offered an artistic vision as a whole in the generation of ’98.
Classic and modern. These authors, from the so-called Group of Three (Baroja, Azorin and Maeztu), began writing in a juvenile hyper-leftist vein which later will be oriented to a conceptiontraditional old and new. Soon, however, continued the controversy: Pio Baroja and Maeztu denied the existence of this generation, and later Pedro Salinas’s said, after careful analysis, university courses and short article in Revista de Occidente (December , 1935), following the concept of “literary generation “as defined by the German literary critic Julius Petersen; this article appeared later in Spanish Literature.
Siglo XX, 1949.
Ruben Dario
1867-1916
P
Oeta, Nicaraguan journalist and diplomat, considered the founder of modernism.
Born in Metapa, now Ciudad Darío (Nicaragua). His parents separated when he was still very small and a grandmother who raised him as spoiled, much agreed and submitted in Managua, still a teenager, as an artist prodigy. He read the French poets of the time I was invited to recite poetry. In 1886 he made a trip to Santiago de Chile, which was his first contact with the progress and the metropolis. He was fascinated, and there published his first great book Blue(1888), a book that drew critical attention and that the Spanish writer Juan Valera highly commended. Back in Managua married Rafaela Contreras in 1891, fifteen months after his first son and his wife died in 1893. In 1892, he traveled to Spain as representative of the Nicaraguan Government to attend events celebrating the fourth centenary of the discovery of America. They happen a few years of travels in America, Chile and France, and a residence in Buenos Aires working for the newspaper La Nacion, which gave him an international reputation. In 1898 he returned to Spain as correspondent of the newspaper and, at this time in Europe, alternating between Paris and Madrid residence is here, in 1900, when he meets Francesca Sanchez, a peasant woman, with whom he had a son and lived with her until the rest of his days. Become a great poet of success in Europe and America, was appointed Nicaragua’s diplomatic representative in Madrid in 1907, which required him to travel and hence is regarded as the ‘ambassador of modernism’ in the world. Darius was a man who had not forgotten their provincial roots although it had become a cosmopolitan total, but that the world was jubilant in Europe was ending.
He began his literary career in Chile. His early poems are a mixture of traditionalism, romanticism, the style of Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, with a commitment to social themes;
Abrojos (1887) and Canto epic glories of Chile (1888). That same year he published Blue (1888, revised in 1890) still work on the exaltation of romantic love as something harmonious with nature and the cosmos. It is divided into four parts:
‘Spring’, which develops the theme of sexual love as something sacred, in the line of the Song of Songs, ‘Summer’ revolves around love and instinct to ‘Autumnal’ is sung as love nostalgia and, finally, in ‘Winter’ is a worldly love and capable of challenging modern weather and the seasons as the lovers take refuge in warm-bed … Covered Astrakhan fur. In this book should be considered the creator of modernism, writers such as Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan, Antonio Machado, Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Herrera y Reissig recognized him as the creator who promotes a new era in Spanish-language poetry.
poetry of the generation of 98
For Spain the nineteenth century ended with a serious crisis: the end of its colonial empire in 1898. This event sparked a wave of indignation and protest that appeared in literature through the writers of the Generation of ’98.
It is not exactly a literary movement, but a group of writers emerging in the aftermath of 98 representing a desire for political renewal and social roots in the regeneration. Coincide in their tracks: the Castilian landscape, interest in people’s daily life and return to the classics. They are also in search of simplicity in form and in the use of direct language.
The main components of the generation are:
Miguel de Unamuno, Valle-Inclan, Antonio Machado, Pío Baroja and Azorin.
The last two did not grow poetry.
Antonio Machado 1875-1939
Sevilla, 1875 – Collioure, 1939) Spanish poet. Although influenced by modernism and symbolism, his work is lyrical expression of the ideas of the Generation of ’98. Son of Antonio Machado y Alvarez folklorist and younger brother of poet Manuel Machado, spent his childhood in Seville and in 1883 settled with his family in Madrid.
He trained at the Free Institution of Education and other institutes in Madrid. In 1899, during a first trip to Paris, worked on the editorial Garnier, before returning to Paris, where he befriended R. Dario. Back in Spain attended the literary and met Ramon Jimenez, R. Del Valle-Inclán and M. De Unamuno.
In 1907 he became professor of French at the Institute of Soria, a city where two years later married Leonor Izquierdo. In 1910 he was granted a pension to study philology in Paris for a year, stay who used to attend courses in philosophy of H. Bedier Bergson at the College de France. After the death of his wife in 1912, became the Institute of Baeza.
Doctorate in Philosophy and Literature (1918), played his chair in Segovia and in 1928 was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy. At the beginning of the Civil War was in Madrid, where he moved with his mother and other relatives to the Valencian village of Rocafort and then to Barcelona. In January 1939 he made his way into exile, but death overtook him in the French village of Collioure.