Romanticism arrived late and lasted only for a short but intense period, since in the second half of the 19th century it was supplanted by Realism, whose nature was antithetical to that of Romantic literature.
Traditional and revolutionary Romanticism
Costumbrism Costumbrism focused on contemporary life, largely from the point of view of the "common" people, and expressed itself in pure, correct language. The principal author in the Costumbrist style was Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, situated on the margins of Romanticism, and in an ironic position in relation to it. Costumbrism, born out of Romanticism, but as a manifestation of nostalgia for the values and customs of the past, contributed to the decadence of the Romantic movement and the rise of Realism, as it became bourgeois and turned into a style of description.
Historic context
Characteristics of Romanticism Rejection of Neoclassicism. Faced with the scrupulous rigor and order with which rules were observed in the 18th century, the romantic writers combined the genres and verses of distinct media, at times mixing verse and prose; in the theater the rule of three unities (action, place, and time) was despised, and they alternated the comic with the dramatic.
Subjectivism. Whatever the type of work, the passionate soul of the author poured into it all of its feelings of dissatisfaction with a world that limited and frustrated the expression of its longings and worries, in relation to love, society, and country alike. They identified nature with spirit, and expressed it as melancholy, gloom, mystery, and darkness, in contrast with the neo-Classicists, who barely showed interest in the natural world. Insatiable cravings for passionate love, happiness, and the possession of the infinite caused in the Romantics a disheartenment, an immense disappointment that sometimes brought them to suicide, as in the case of Mariano José de Larra. Attraction of the nocturnal and mysterious. The Romantics situated their sorrowful and disappointed feelings in mysterious or melancholic places, such as ruins, forests, and cemeteries. In the same manner, they felt attracted to the supernatural, that which escapes logic, such as miracles, apparitions, visions from beyond the grave, the diabolical, and witchcraft. Flight from the world. Their disgust toward the bourgeois society that they were forced to live in caused the Romantics to try to turn their back on their circumstances, imagining past eras in which their ideals prevailed, or taking inspiration from the exotic. In contrast with the neo-Classicists, who admired Greco-Roman antiquity, the Romantics preferred the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Their favorite modes of expression were the novel, legends, and historical drama.
Beginnings Romanticism came to Spain through Andalusia and Catalonia.
In Andalucía, the Prussian consul in Cádiz, Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber, father of novelist Fernán Caballero, published a series of articles between 1818 and 1819 in the Diario Mercantil (Mercantile Daily) of Cádiz, in which he defended Spanish theatre of the Siglo de Oro, and was widely attacked by the neo-Classicists. Against him were José Joaquín de Mora and Antonio Alcalá Galiano, who argued from a traditionalist, antiliberal, and absolutist point of view. Böhl de Faber's ideas were incompatible with theirs (since they were still tied to the Age of Enlightenment), despite the fact that they represented European Literary Modernism.
In Catalonia, El Europeo was a journal published in Barcelona from 1823 to 1824 by two Italian editors, one Englishman, and the young Catalans Bonaventura Carles Aribau and Ramón López Soler. This publication defended moderate traditionalist Romanticism following Böhl's example, totally rejecting the virtues of Neo-Classicism. An exposition of the Romantic ideology appeared for the first time in its pages, in an article by Luigi Monteggia, titled Romanticismo.
Poetry
The romantic poets created their works in the midst of a fury of emotions, forming verses out of whatever they felt or thought. Critics have found in their works a lyricism of great power, but at the same time vulgar, uninspiring verse.
Some of the characteristics of Romantic poetry are: The I, the inner self. José de Espronceda, setting down in his Canto a Teresa a painful confession of love and disappointment, managed with great skill to translate his feelings into poetry. Passionate love, with its sudden and total surrenders and quick abandonments. The agony and the ecstasy. Inspiration by historical and mythical subjects. Religion, though frequently it is through a revolt against consequent compassion, even to the extent of exalting the devil. Social vindication, value placed on marginalized people, such as beggars Nature, displayed in all its manifestations and variations. Romantics often gave their poems mysterious settings, such as cemeteries, storms, the raging sea, etc. Satire, frequently associated with political and literary events.
It was also a sign that a new spirit was inspiring the creation of verse. By contrast with the monotonous neoclassic repetition of songs and lyrics, poets proclaimed their right to use all existing variations on meter, to adapt those from other languages, and to innovate where necessary. In this respect, as in others, Romanticism prefigured the modernist audacities of the end of the century.
José de Espronceda
Espronceda was born in 1808 in Pajares de la Vega, located near Almendralejo, Badajoz. He founded the secret society of Los numantinos, whose aim was to "demolish the absolutist government". Because of his involvement with this society, Espronceda was imprisoned. At age 18 he fled to Lisbon and joined with a group of liberal exiles. There he met Teresa Mancha, the woman with whom he lived in London. After an act of political agitation, he returned to Spain in 1833. He lived a dissipated life, full of incidents and adventures, which caused Teresa Mancha to leave him in 1838. He was at the point of marrying another lover, when in 1842 he died in Madrid.
Batallas, tempestades, amoríos, por mar y tierra, lances, descripciones de campos y ciudades, desafíos y el desastre y furor de las pasiones, goces, dichas, aciertos, desvaríos, con algunas morales reflexiones acerca de la vida y de la muerte, de mi propia cosecha, que es mi fuerte.
Battles, tempests, love affairs, by sea and land, deeds, descriptions of countryside and cities, challenges and the disaster and furor of passions, enjoyments, happiness, successes, deliriums, with some moral reflections about life, death, and my forte: My own personal harvest.
Espronceda worked in the principal literary genres, such as the historical novel, with Sancho Saldaña o El castellano de Cuéllar (1834), and the epic poem, with El Pelayo, but his most important work was his poetry. He published Poesías in 1840 after returning from exile. It is a collection of poems of different types, which brings together his youthful neoclassic poems with other, more intense, Romantic works. These last were the most important, and elevated marginalized types: Canción del pirata (Song of the Pirate), El verdugo (The Executioner), El mendigo (The Beggar), and Canto del cosaco (Song of the Cossack). His most important works were El estudiante de Salamanca (1839) and El diablo mundo: El estudiante de Salamanca (1839): This composition consists of some two thousand verses of different lengths. It narrates the crimes of don Félix de Montemar, whose lover Elvira dies of heartsickness when he abandons her. One night, he sees her ghost and follows it through the streets and contemplates his own burial. In the house of the dead, he marries the corpse of Elvira, and dies. El diablo mundo: This work was never finished. It consists of 8,100 verses of various meters, and it seems to be an epic of the human life. The second canto (Canto a Teresa) occupies the better part of the poem, and in it he evokes his love for Teresa and laments her death.
Other poets
In spite of the brief period during which romantic lyric poetry thrived in Spain, there arose other notable poets who deserve mention, such as the Barcelonan Juan Arolas (1805–1873), the Galician Nicomedes Pastor Díaz (1811–1863), Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–1873) and Pablo Piferrer (1818–1848). Piferrer, in spite of writing only in Spanish, was one of the precursors of the romantic movement in Catalonia.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (March 23, 1814 – Madrid February 1, 1873) was a Cuban writer and poet of the 19th century. Although Cuban, she lived most of her life in Spain. She wrote various poems, plays, and novels. Her most famous work is an antislavery novel called Sab (novel).
Carolina Coronado
Carolina Coronado (Almendralejo, 1823–Lisbon, 1911) merits special mention. She spent a great part of her childhood in the Extremaduran countryside, and from a very young age showed a talent for poetry. She married an American diplomat and lived in various foreign countries. Family misfortune prompted her to seek solitude and retreat in Lisbon, where she died in 1911. Her most important work is Poesías (1852).
Prose During the Romantic period, there was a great interest in literary fiction, in particular, adventure and mystery novels; however, Spanish output of this type was scanty, limited to translations of foreign novels. More than a thousand translations circulated in Spain before 1850, in the historic, romantic, chivalrous, and melodramatic genres, representing writers such as Alexandre Dumas, père, Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, and Victor Hugo. Spanish prose essentially consisted of the novel, scientific or scholarly prose, journalism, and the intense development of costumbrismo.
During the first quarter of the century, four distinct types of novels developed: moral and educative novels, romances, horror stories, and anticlerical novels. The most purely Romantic of these is the anticlerical novel. However, the Romantic influence would shape, principally, the historical novel.
Historical novels The historical novel developed in imitation of Walter Scott (80 of his works had been translated), author of Waverley, Ivanhoe, and other novels of adventure set in the Scottish and English past. Spanish historical novels fall into two categories: liberal and moderate. Within the liberal school existed both anti-clerical and populist currents. On the other hand, the moderate school produced, on occasion, novels exalting traditional and Catholic values. The most notable Spanish authors are: Enrique Gil y Carrasco (Villafranca del Bierzo), 1815–Berlín 1846. A lawyer and diplomat, he was the author of El señor de Bembibre, the best Spanish historical novel, written in imitation of Walter Scott. Francisco Navarro Villoslada (1818–1895), who wrote a series of historical novels when the romantic genre was in decline and Realism was coming to be at its height. His novels were inspired by Basque traditions, and were set in the medieval era. His most famous work is Amaya, o los vascos en el siglo VIII (Amaya, or the Basques of the 8th century), in which the Basques and the Visigoths ally themselves against the Muslim invasion. It is also worth mentioning the contributions to the historical genre made by Mariano José de Larra, Serafín Estébanez Calderón and Francisco Martínez de la Rosa.
Scholarly writing The majority of these works originated from the discussions in the assembly that adopted the Constitution of Cádiz. The most representative authors were Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) and Jaime Balmes Urpía (1810–1848):