Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literature: Realism and Modernism
Nineteenth-Century Realism
Literary and artistic tastes were moving away from Romanticism. Passion, the fantastic, and subjectivity were abandoned in favor of external reality and the everyday. Works were based on observations of life, seeking credibility and objectivity, documenting what writers observed.
Benito Perez Galdos
Galdos participated in national politics in the Canary Islands, taking ever more radical positions, but never losing his tolerant character. At the end of his life, he was forgotten, blind, and facing financial difficulties.
Galdos’s Work
His work is immense. He wrote for the theater, articles, and essays, but is best known for his novels.
National Events
Galdos dedicated almost 40 years to writing National Episodes, a work with which he purported to recount the recent history of Spain from the Battle of Trafalgar to the Restoration, giving equal weight to the story and the actors.
Leopoldo Alas Clarin
Clarin’s Work
He wrote numerous articles on literary criticism, including La Regenta (The Regent).
La Regenta
The protagonist has a fiery temperament that her husband cannot satisfy due to his age. The envious society contributes to her fall into the arms of Don Juan, and then rejects her. Clarin dissects a provincial society of the time, exposing its hypocrisy, mediocrity, and vulgarity.
Other Figures
Emilia Pardo Bazan
End of the Century (1890-1910): Society and Culture
The Disaster of ’98: the loss of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. This event, and the war with Morocco, triggered the decline of Spain as a power and left it mired in terrible pessimism.
The End of the Century Crisis
The late nineteenth century was based on the European consciousness, a body of knowledge that humanity had acquired. Religion had been questioned, as the Earth was no longer considered the center of the universe, man was believed to have descended from apes, and dreams were thought to influence our actions. Confirmation of this knowledge opened a religious crisis that did not answer the eternal human questions: What is man? What is the meaning of life?
Modernism
The response of intellectuals facing the crisis at the end of the century was Modernism (the Generation of ’98), which had its origins in Hispanic America.
Ruben Dario
Born in Nicaragua, he came to Spain. His many travels in Europe allowed him to spread Modernism.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
Born in Moguer in 1881, at age 19 he traveled to Madrid where he made friends with Ruben Dario. His frequent depressions led him to stay in various sanatoriums and in Moguer, where he wrote his famous Platero y Yo (Platero and I). He supported the Republic and, when the war broke out, was exiled to America. In 1956, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Juan Ramon was fully devoted to poetry. His poetry evolved greatly over the years. Obsessively, Juan Ramon corrected and revised his work again and again. His biggest ambition was to achieve pure, perfectly clean poetry.
The Generation of ’98
The writers group called the Generation of ’98 and the Modernists shared a series of traits: they were of similar ages, were anarchists or socialists, were friends and held gatherings, and loved the end-of-the-century crisis and the Disaster of ’98.
José Martínez Ruiz, Azorín
Azorin’s Work and Style
He wrote many essays dealing with issues that most concerned the intellectuals of the century, particularly the subject of Spain.