Spanish literature

A group of younger writers, among them Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín), made changes to literature's form and content.

Over the next several years a wealth of young new writers, among them Juan José Millás, Rosa Montero, Javier Marías, Luis Mateo Díez, José María Merino, Félix de Azúa, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Enrique Vila-Matas, Carme Riera, and later Antonio Muñoz Molina and Almudena Grandes, would begin carving out a prominent place for themselves within the Spanish cultural field.

Called “the last scholar of the ancient world", St. Isidore penned theological and proto-scientific treatises, letters, and a series of histories that would serve as models for the rest of Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

Medieval Spanish poets recognized the Mester de Juglaría as a literary form written by the minstrels (juglares) and composed of varying line length and use of assonance instead of rhyme.

He, with the help of his groups of intellectuals, directed the composition of many prose works including Las siete partidas, the first modern book of laws of the land written in the people's language.

Among the principal features of the Renaissance were the revival of learning based on classical sources, the rise of courtly patronage, the development of perspective in painting, and advances in science.

The Baroque style used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music.

Enlightenment thinkers sought to apply systematic thinking to all forms of human activity, carrying it to the ethical and governmental spheres in exploration of the individual, society and the state.

Modernism was rooted in the idea that "traditional" forms of art, literature, religious faith, social organization, and daily life had become outdated; therefore it was essential to sweep them aside.

For a group of younger writers, among them Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín), the Disaster and its cultural repercussions inspired a deeper, more radical literary shift that affected both form and content.

Nevertheless, it stuck as a way to describe a group of writers who turned in content from the more general exploration of universal middle class values characteristic of Nineteenth Century Realism to an obsession with questions of a more national nature.

Poets Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Manuel Altolaguirre were likewise the most closely tied to formal academia yet.

Their work provides a capstone to what some have called the “Silver Age" of Spanish Letters, a period that began with the veritable explosion of novel production following the bloodless coup of 1868 and that would come to a tragic end with the outbreak of civil war in July 1936.

In their early years their work arises still out of mostly local and national traditions, culminating in their united celebration of the tri-centennial of the death of Golden Age poet Luis de Góngora.

From mid decade until the arrival of Spain's Second Republic in 1931, the Generation's poets reached the apex of their experimental writings, manifesting a clear awareness of the international vanguard “—isms" sweeping major Western capitals of the day.

All but a small handful of the remaining writers had fled into exile, dispersed across the length of the American continent, most never to enjoy the close associations of conferences, tertulias, and theater premiers that had so often united them in pre-war Madrid.

The published works of this period were true to pseudo-fascist dictator Francisco Franco's reactionary vision of a second Spanish golden age than to the material and existential anguish facing the majority of the country's population of the time.

In 1942, Camilo José Cela's novel, La familia de Pascual Duarte, used just enough experimental arrangement (temporally disjointed narrative development to problematize simple accusations of political cause-effect critique; prefaces and post-scripts that confuse authorial intentions) to avoid the censors´ cuts and to present to discerning Spanish readers an exposé of a spiritually troubled, socially impoverished, and structurally violent society.

With the 1945 publication of the Nadal Prize winning Nada by Carmen Laforet and the 1947 release of Miguel Delibes's La sombra del ciprés es alargada, readers of intelligent Spanish narrative at last had cause for hope.

Equally influenced by the films of the Italian neorealists, novelists such as Luis Romero (La noria, 1951), Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (El jarama, 1956), Jesús Fernández Santos (Los bravos, 1956), Carmen Martín Gaite (Entre visillos, 1957), Ignacio Aldecoa (El fulgor y la sangre, 1954), and Juan Goytisolo (Juegos de manos, 1954) produced a social realist tradition that was as celebrated as it was short-lived.

José María Castellet's publication of Nueve novísimos poetas españoles recognized a group of artists whose works had similarly returned to early century experimentation.

The works of Pere Gimferrer, Guillermo Carnero, and Leopoldo Panero, arguably the most important poets of the group, manifest a decidedly baroque style full of oblique cultural references, metapoetic devices, and other forms of extreme poetic self-consciousness spilling into the precious.

During the 1980s, Spanish narrative began appearing regularly on best seller lists for the first time since the pre-war era and many of this new generation became literary and cultural celebrities, living off their work as writers with all its blessing and curses, including the obligation to publish or perish.

The big money available through novel publishing manifest itself in the 1990s in the explosion of literary prizes, awarded in Spain, unlike the UK's Man Booker or the U.S.´s Pulitzer, to unpublished works.

These celebrities range from politically powerful figures like Antonio Muñoz Molina and Jon Juaristi to brief media flashes like Ray Loriga, José Ángel Mañas, and Lucía Etxebarría.

The “Generación X," as critics dubbed them, brought black humor to a certain kind of post-political social realism focused principally on sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and the mental illness that accompanies it.

New novelists whose work is more likely to endure that began publishing in this period include Rafael Chirbes, Belén Gopegui, David Trueba, the Basques writers Bernardo Atxaga and Álvaro Bermejo, the Galician's Manuel Rivas and Suso de Toro among others.

Notwithstanding the plethora of prize money that threatened to drown out quality with media-generated noise, the Spanish literary field at the end of the twentieth century was as promising as it had been since the 1920s.

Other acclaimed and widely read writers both nationally and internationally are Enrique Vila-Matas, Rosa Montero, Antonio Muñoz Molina, as well as more commercial authors like Carlos Ruiz Zafón.