Spanish Literature: Baroque Period Key Authors & Works
Luis de Góngora
Góngora’s new style is based on the concentration of procedures, which is a stylistic and poetic revolutionary concept. Despite being elitist and removed from the accusations of darkness, new forms spread and came to constitute a poetic stream, Culteranismo. Polyphemus and Galatea is a mythological poem composed of 63 royal octaves. Góngora, with Polyphemus, surprised his contemporaries with the poem’s difficulty and novelties. He contributed numerous mythological allusions and, especially, a convoluted language.
- Romances de Góngora: “Sissy Sister.”
- Letrilla: “Andeme I Caliente.”
The Dialogue
The dialogue genre was widely accepted throughout the 16th century and was essential for the development of the novel. Main authors include Juan de Valdés (Dialogo de la Lengua) and Alfonso de Valdés.
The Byzantine Novel
The argument of the Byzantine novel takes the form of a pilgrimage, during which adventures are mixed with amorous action. The young lovers, who are also the protagonists, are often separated in the narrative, but reunited in the final marriage.
Trends of 17th-Century Prose
The Byzantine novel was appreciated, while chivalric romances, pastoral, and picaresque novels disappeared. The novel was consolidated with Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. In prose fiction, a non-fictional genre develops: Menippean satire (Quevedo).
Baltasar Gracián
He put his pen to the service of morality and politics. Part of Gracián’s writings constitute a series of aphoristic books, written in a highly condensed and elliptical prose. These are arts of prudence that teach how to succeed in the complex Baroque society. Gracián wanted to compose a concept art and advocated for a pithy style and dense contents. El Criticón is his masterpiece, showing a contraposition of reason and nature and a contrast between appearance and reality.
Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)
This short book starts the modern novel as an entertaining story with a probable, realistic tone in which the protagonist’s character is the product of the world that surrounds him. Lazarillo is considered the first picaresque novel, despite the fact that the protagonist is not a proper rogue.
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes is a major figure in world literature, and his masterpiece is Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote plays, interludes, and a tragedy (La Numancia).
- Plays: Comedies include Los Cautivos and comedies of customs and entanglement.
- Cervantes composed 8 interludes in prose and La Numancia in verse. La Numancia is a heroic play about the defense of Numancia against the Romans, focusing on collective ownership.
Don Quixote
Don Quixote was published in two parts: the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. Cervantes uses the device of inventing an Arabic manuscript that he claims to have found, which tells the story of Don Quixote and Sancho. The author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, is a faithful Arabic chronicler, not only of the adventures of the protagonists but also of their smallest conversations, and even claims to have recorded their thoughts. Cervantes contracts a Moor to translate the text of the chronicle into Castilian. The text would not be read as anything but a translation. The recourse to a fake author writing in a foreign tongue was normal in the books of chivalry of his time. It was essentially a comic book, but with the romance in the play, it becomes the novel par excellence that raises the confrontation of the ideal and reality.
Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco de Quevedo’s literature is distinguished by a striking dominance of language that can create unusual verbal associations through which he evokes a grotesque image of reality. His works include moral poems, religious poems, circumstantial poems, love poems, and satirical poems (Sueños).