Spanish Golden Age Literature: Picaresque Novels, Baroque, and Renaissance

Posted on Feb 3, 2025 in Arts and Humanities

Spanish Golden Age Literature

Novel idealistic abstract, artificial style, with a tendency to hyperbole. The issues most commonly used are: love, heroism, courtesy, loyalty, justice …

Picaresque Novel

Features: The central character is an antihero. The autobiographical narrative recounts the protagonist’s pilgrimage to various masters, learning and evolving from successive defeats and failures, improving the use of deception.

The objectives of the rogue are to secure food, shelter from the cold, and a bed to sleep in. To achieve this, they are willing to do whatever it takes, regardless of honor or shame. Despite their purposes and attempts to climb a small step in the social hierarchy, their projects fail, and any apparent success is tinged with disappointment. They have no morals or solutions to their problems.

Realism: Negativity in the morality of the masters of the rogue, especially from the clergy. Use of irony steadily. Flexibility, both in length and in style.

Themes (Lazarillo)

  • The race of life
  • Hunger
  • Cold
  • Poverty
  • Greed
  • Cruelty
  • Hypocrisy
  • Honor
  • Social portrait of an era (heroic and miserable)
  • Anti-clericalism (many of the masters of Lazarus are clerics and embody the most reprehensible vices)

Style

  • Pre-planning of the work
  • Integration of anecdotes
  • Setting the protagonist’s personality through the lessons
  • The language of the narrative is simple, plain with proverbs and idioms
  • The dialogue is constantly present
  • The descriptions of both characters and locations are vivid and expressive

Baroque

The movement that shows the production of s.XVII Artit, continuation and reformulation Renaissance aesthetic keys.

Ideal

  • Devaluation of human life and human nature
  • Life as a problem
  • Anguish and expiration
  • Pessimism
  • Existence as a disappointment

Aesthetics

  • Goals: excite the sensitivity to violent stimuli, the surprising reasons
  • Models: Classic binds to the whim of the author
  • Style: elaborate artifice, exaggeration, contrast

Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 in Alcala de Henares. In 1569, Spain flees and goes to Italy where he met Italian texts. In 1571, he suffers a wound in his hand and is called ‘manco de Lepanto’. In 1575, he is kidnapped along with his brother, who released him in 1577. He married Catalina de Salazar in 1584 and writes ‘La Galatea’. In 1597, he is jailed and there begins ‘Don Quixote’ (1st part 1605 – 2nd 1615). He dies in 1616.

Renaissance

Golden Age

The historical, cultural, and artistic heyday of Spain between the end of the 15th century and the mid-17th century.

1492

Discovery of America, reconquest of Granada, expulsion of Jews converted to Christianity, and publication of Nebrija’s Gramática Castellana.

  • Aristotelianism: scientistic and naturalistic interest
  • Neoplatonism: the ideal vision of beauty
  • Neopitagorismo: the essence of things is in the numbers and geometry
  • Stoicism: to achieve wisdom it is necessary to control emotions
  • Epicureanism: the continued pleasure is the source of happiness, which is achieved with a perfect balance between body and mind
  • Naturalism: Highlighting the natural aspects of man against the supernatural
  • Skepticism: denies the existence of a universal and objective knowledge (the question is the basic method of analysis)
  • Erasmianism: religion and spirituality over foreign cults

Features

  • Consolidation of Humanism, anthropocentrism, man stands at the center of the universe
  • Life is a place of enjoyment
  • Man’s ability to understand and dominate the world
  • Clear separation of faith and science, and theology and philosophy
  • Interest in Greco-Roman classics
  • Revaluation of the classical languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew)
  • Exaltation of the vernacular
  • Search for a beauty ideal based on elegance, restraint, and harmony
  • Interest in literature and art as reflecting reality as it is (there is the picaresque novel)

Poetry: Topics

  • Love: the poet purifies and makes you feel full but is full of pain because of the impossibility of getting your loved one
  • Idealized nature
  • You can have different functions in the literature: the poet-help vindicate
  • Perfect place to retire in the world
  • Mythological scene of a meeting
  • Carpe diem
  • Mythology: symbol of the poet’s feelings
  • Asceticism: flight of the world and its venality and contact with nature to facilitate the meeting of happiness and an approach to God
  • Mysticism: metaphorical expression the soul’s union with God