Literary Movements and Generations
Romanticism
Characteristics:
- New themes and forms in literature.
- Themes include love, pessimism, absolute passion, reflections of human feelings in nature, idealization of the past, and interest in the exotic and picturesque.
- Forms include a mixture of prose and verse, use of verses with different syllable counts, and literary expressions.
- Mixing of genres (narrative and lyric poetry).
- Theater works breaking neoclassical rules and raising legendary issues.
- Prose of historicism, including historical novels.
- Pictures of manners, often published in newspapers, reflecting everyday life.
Realism
Characteristics:
- Interest in accurately and objectively reflecting characters and environments.
- Characters drawn from contemporary life.
- Recognizable scenarios for contemporary readers.
- Themes exploring conflicts and feelings of various social classes.
- Natural and direct speech fitting the characters.
- Omniscient narrator aware of the environment and characters’ inner worlds.
- Moral purpose in some novels, describing societal defects and effects to promote improvement.
Naturalism
Characteristics:
- Experimental method in observing reality; investigating laws governing the natural world and human behavior.
- Importance of heredity and environment in determining character behavior.
- Presence of sometimes unpleasant aspects of society.
- Interest in marginal characters to demonstrate the influence of heredity.
Modernism
Characteristics:
- Rebellion against the bourgeois aesthetic of the late 19th century.
- Poetry as the preferred genre.
- Escapism leading to exotic settings and ancient times in works.
- Aristocratic and cosmopolitan elements.
- Intense eroticism expressing love.
- Alternating melancholy, rebelliousness, and vitality.
- Search for new poetic language highlighting musicality, rhythm, and sensory values (e.g., using antepenultimate words, anaphora, alliteration).
- Metric renovation (e.g., Rubén Darío resurrecting forgotten verses).
Generation of ’98
Characteristics:
- Concern for Spain and zeal for reform.
- Openness to Europe and love for Spain.
- Taste for traditional and popular lexicon.
- Moderation in language and rejection of rhetoric.
- Subjectivism in describing landscapes and a broader vision of reality.
Generation of ’27
A group of friends with similar interests, including poets (Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, Manuel Altolaguirre, Emilio Prados, Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso), essayists (María Zambrano, José Bergamín), and novelists (Francisco Ayala, Rosa Chacel). They sought balance between tradition and originality, and between popular and high culture.
Trends:
- Neopopularismo: Attraction to the metrics and style of popular poetry.
- Avant-garde: Influence of Creationism (Gerardo Diego, Manuel Altolaguirre) and Surrealism (Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York).
- Pure Poetry: Trend initiated by Jorge Guillén in 1928, seeking to express serenity.
Evolution:
- Initiation phase (1920-1927): First publications of the poets.
- Maturity stage (1928-1936): Golden age of the group. Important publications include Jorge Guillén’s Cántico and García Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. Increased social commitment towards the end, with works like Rafael Alberti’s Poet in the Street (1936).
- Disintegration stage (1936-): The Civil War dispersed the group. Lorca was assassinated, and others went into exile. War and exile influenced their works, shifting from playfulness to a focus on existential problems.
Topics:
- Love: Passionate vision mixing pleasure and pain (e.g., Vicente Aleixandre). Love as an art requiring imagination and effort (e.g., Pedro Salinas).
- Wholeness: Harmony of nature (e.g., Jorge Guillén). Loneliness and rootlessness (e.g., Luis Cernuda).
- Death: Resignation (e.g., Lorca’s early poems and Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías).