Understanding Romanticism: Key Features and Major Works
Romanticism in Literature
The Romantic Era
When: First half of the nineteenth century
Where: Mainly in England and Germany, later spreading to France and Spain
What it is: Romanticism is a literary movement that champions the creative power of spirit, imagination, feeling, and passion. The artist’s ego must be free to express its creation. The romantic writer is often a rebel, rebelling against the bourgeoisie and rational thought.
Key Characteristics of Romanticism
- Rejection of reality and escape through imagination to distant, exotic, or past worlds.
- Analysis of the Self: Romantic writers are individualists who explore their inner selves, including melancholy, loneliness, and anxiety.
- Importance of Landscape: Nature descriptions often reflect the artist’s inner state, featuring dark woods, abandoned gardens, sunsets, storms, and “Gothic” atmospheres (castles, dungeons, cemeteries).
- Use of popular and national elements, advocating for indigenous languages and folk traditions.
- Creative freedom in technique and structure.
Spanish Romantic Poetry
Features:
Topics:
- Love, passionate and often unattainable.
- The theme of death.
- Political and social issues (explored through “rebel” figures like pirates and prisoners).
Metric: Unusual and mixed metric combinations, often using popular metric forms.
Taste for narrative poetry, legends, and romances.
Major Romantic Poets:
José de Espronceda
Key Works: Poems (especially “The Student of Salamanca” and “El Diablo Mundo”)
- “The Student of Salamanca”: A narrative poem with a mysterious atmosphere, telling the story of Felix de Montemar, a Casanova.
- “El Diablo Mundo”: A philosophical exploration of the world.
- Recurring Topics: Love, outcasts, and rebel characters (e.g., “Pirate Song,” “The Beggar,” “A person’s death”).
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Principal Work: Rimas, divided into four sections:
- Rhymes 1-11: Focus on poetry and love as something unattainable.
- Rhymes 12-29: Deal with the fullness of love, directed towards the beloved woman.
- Rhymes 30-51: Reflect the failure of love and heartbreak due to abandonment.
- Rhymes 52-79: Express loneliness, anguish, and pain.
Characteristics: Brevity, simplicity, free verse (assonance rhyme and heptasyllabic or heroic verse).
Rosalía de Castro
(From Galicia, wrote in both Castilian and Galician)
Main Works: Follas Novas (in Galician), On the Banks of the Sar (in Castilian)
Other Works: The Flower, Cantares Gallegos
Romantic Theatre
Features:
- Breaks with neoclassical theatre, abandoning rules requiring unity of action, place, and time. Emphasizes creative freedom.
- Mixes tragic and comic genres, verse and prose in the same work.
- Structure: Typically in 3, 4, or 5 acts.
- Most frequent genre: Historical drama (set in the past, especially the Middle Ages, with gloomy settings like cemeteries or dungeons).
- Characters: Hidden heroes of mysterious origin, virtuous women, often with tragic outcomes.
- Subject: Passionate love leading to death, and the theme of freedom.
Romantic Main Works:
Don Alvaro, O LA FUERZA DEL SINO (Duque de Rivas)
An impossible love story.
Mixes prose and verse, with the action spanning several years and changing scenarios across 5 acts.
Plot: Don Alvaro is discovered with his beloved Leonor by her father. Alvaro accidentally kills him and flees to Italy, where he encounters Don Carlos, Eleanor’s brother. They fight in mourning, and Carlos dies. Alvaro returns to Spain and retires to a monastery, but there he meets another brother, Alfonso, who is also killed in a duel. Before his death, Leonor appears on stage and is killed by her brother. Don Alvaro commits suicide.
DON JUAN TENORIO (José Zorrilla)
The most frequently performed drama in Spanish theatre history.
Plot: Don Juan, a womanizer, bets Don Luis Mejía on who can have more affairs. The bet involves seducing the daughter of the Commander, Agnes, a model of virtue secluded in a convent. He seduces her, kidnaps her, and kills the Commander. He flees, but the hunter of women has been hunted since fleeing in love with Agnes. Five years later, he returns to Seville to discover that Agnes died of grief. Don Juan goes to the cemetery, and the Commander drags him to death, but the specter of Doña Inés enables him to repent and be saved from hell.