Post-War Spanish Literature: A Comprehensive Overview
Post-War Spanish Literature
Jaime Gil de Biedma
(February 2, 1929 – January 8, 1990)
A poet of the School of Barcelona, Jaime Gil de Biedma is a clear representative of the poetic renewal that occurred in early 1960s poetry. His work focuses on the exploration of personal experiences to develop, from the anecdotal, moral, or intimate reflection, and offers a disenchanted picture of the bourgeois world to which he belonged. Biedma achieves this through a cordial tone that oscillates between irony and skepticism.
Gil de Biedma deals with themes such as:
- Nostalgia of childhood and adolescence
- Love and eroticism
- Friendship
- The passage of time
- Ethical and social issues
His style demonstrates a deliberate effort toward anti-rhetorical, conversational tone, which follows the line of the poet Luis Cernuda. This style has had a significant influence on later poets of the 1970s and 1980s. His work is collected in the volume Compañeros de Viaje (1958-1968). In his later years, he sought new ways of free verse in a voice present in everyday life, as seen in Moralidades y Mientras (1970).
The Novel From the Post-War to Present
1940s
The 1940s saw the publication of two novels that began the resurgence of realism from an existential perspective:
- La Familia de Pascual Duarte (1942) by Camilo José Cela
- Nada (1945) by Carmen Laforet
These novels utilize innovative narrative techniques to bear witness to the daily, rough, intimate, and painful reality of the time.
1950s
The Generation of ’50 emerges, proposing a critical view of society through social realism. This novel explores social issues like:
- The harshness of rural life and work environments
- The urban bourgeoisie
- Memories of the Civil War
Their language is simple, and they use narrative techniques that sometimes employ objectivism, as in the case of El Jarama (1956) by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio.
1960s
The 1960s sees the rise of the Latin American Boom in narrative. A number of authors break through, mixing the real with the fantastic, renewing narrative techniques, and experimenting with the possibilities of language. Notable figures include the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar.
1970s
The 1970s are highly experimental. Innovations from early twentieth-century authors like James Joyce are embraced, as well as the influence of contemporary Hispanic narrators. The innovations consist mainly of creative treatments of narrative techniques:
- Multiple points of view
- Interior monologue
- Complex structure
- Non-linear time and space
- A mixture of genres and linguistic registers
- Lack of punctuation
1980s
The 1980s present a wide variety of trends, including crime fiction, historical fiction, thrillers, experimental literature, and lyrical prose. Notable authors of recent years include Antonio Muñoz Molina, known for works like The Polish Rider (1991) and Plenilunio (1997).
Miguel Delibes
(October 17, 1920 – March 12, 2010)
Born in 1920, Miguel Delibes is a narrator whose trajectory reflects the various phases of the Spanish novel from the Civil War onward. Delibes consistently maintained an ethos of social criticism. With his humanistic approach and love of nature, he portrayed rural environments and the bourgeois world with great expressive skill.
La Sombra del Ciprés es Alargada, which won the Premio Nadal in 1947, brought him recognition and showcased a Christian worldview. Following El Camino (1950), one of his most important novels is Las Ratas (1962), which offers a stark testament to the harsh realities of social and rural poverty.
The Theater From the Post-War to Present
The situation of theater after the war faced particular constraints due to censorship and the commercial interests of employers who catered to a bourgeois audience. The innovative public from before 1936 disappeared, along with exiled writers, and theater faced competition from film.
1940s
Traditional bourgeois theater, aiming only to entertain, triumphed. However, two other renovating trends emerged in parallel:
- Comic theater, characterized by improbable, absurd, or ludicrous situations. These humorous plays toyed with the possibilities of language while providing a critical and unconventional view of society. Key authors include Enrique Jardiel Poncela and Miguel Mihura.
- Ideological theater, serious and unconventional, aligned with existential concerns.
1950s
This critical theater evolved into social realism, encompassing both social and ethical aspects, and sometimes directly political, continuing into the early 1960s. It maintained its social criticism but incorporated new aesthetic forms, such as symbolic trends or grotesque farce.
1970s
New authors and theater groups emerged with a clear experimental and avant-garde approach, marking a break from commercial European trends. They drew inspiration from European theater and sought new formulas, such as theater-spectacle and the mixing of genres. New symbolic languages, accompanied by special stage effects, characterized this era. Among the prominent playwrights of this period is Francisco Nieva, known for works like El Flotador.