Romanticism in Spain: 19th Century Literary Movement
Realism and Poetry in the First Third of the 20th Century
Romanticism in 19th Century Spain
In Spain, Romanticism is considered complex and confusing, with great contradictions that range from rebellion and revolutionary ideas to the return to the Catholic tradition of the monarchy. With regard to political freedom, some understand it as a mere restoration of the ideological, patriotic, and religious values that rationalists had wanted to remove in the 18th century. They glorify Christianity, the Throne, and the Fatherland as maximum values. This aspect of traditional Romanticism includes Walter Scott in England, Chateaubriand in France, and the Duke of Rivas and Jose Zorrilla in Spain. It is based on the ideology of the Restoration, which originated after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, and upholds the traditional values represented by the Church and State. On the other hand, other Romantics, as free citizens, fight all established order in religion, art, and politics. They claim the rights of the individual against society and the law. They represent Revolutionary Romanticism and Liberal Romanticism, and their most prominent figures are Lord Byron in England, Victor Hugo in France, and José de Espronceda in Spain. It rests on three pillars: the pursuit and justification of irrational knowledge that reason has refused, the Hegelian dialectic, and historicism.
Characteristics of Romanticism
- Refusal of Neoclassicism: Faced with the scrupulous precision and order with which the 18th century followed rules, Romantic writers combine genres and verses of different measures, often mixing poetry and prose. In theater, the rule of three unities (place, space, and time) is neglected, and dramatic comedy is alternated.
- Subjectivism: Whatever the genre of the work, the author’s exalted soul pours into it all their feelings of dissatisfaction with a world that restricts and slows the flight of their anxieties, both in love and in society, patriotism, etc. They make nature merge with their mood and display melancholy, gloom, mystery, and darkness. This is unlike the Neoclassicists, who showed little interest in landscape. The desire for passionate love, the longing for happiness, and the possession of the infinite cause unease in the Romantic, a huge disappointment that sometimes leads them to suicide, as in the case of Mariano José de Larra.
- Attraction to the Nocturnal and Mysterious: The Romantics set their mournful, defrauded, or melancholy feelings in mysterious places such as ruins, forests, and cemeteries. In the same way, they are attracted to the supernatural, that which is beyond any logic, like miracles, apparitions, visions of the afterlife, the demonic, and witchcraft.
- Escape from the World Around Them: The rejection of the bourgeois society in which they happen to live leads Romantics to escape from their circumstances, imagining a past in which their ideals prevailed over others or drawing inspiration from the exotic. Against the Greco-Roman antiquity that the Neoclassicists admired, the Romantics prefer the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The most common genres cultivated are the novel, the legend, and historical drama.