Authors and Literary Movements: 16th to 19th Century

Authors and Works of the 16th Century

Peter Seraph: Poet and painter, his date of birth is unknown, and it is known he died around 1566. His poetry still presents points of contact with March. However, he used proper poetic forms of the Renaissance, such as the sonnet, and he cites poets of Greek and Latin classics (Homer, Virgil, and Ovid) and two Italian dolce stil nuovo poets (Dante and Petrarch) plus March. He also wrote in Catalan.

18th Century Authors

Francesc Vicent Garcia: He is considered one of the most outstanding authors of three centuries. Known as the Rector of Vallfogona, he was born in Tortosa and died in Vallfogona. His reputation is based on one aspect of his work: that which emphasizes a thick, deliberately exaggerated humor, which passes through mockery and thus a scatological tendency. However, he is also the author of sonnets of great lyricism. Typically baroque, his passages, then both grotesque and sublime, have often been linked to the Conceptismo of Francisco de Quevedo.

Francesc Fontanella: He relates, in contrast, to Culteranismo and the practices of Luis Góngora, making use of words of Latin roots, mythological allusions, or violent hyperbatons, among other resources, giving the poem an artificial and politically castilianized character. He is the author of a collection of sonnets and the theatrical liaison Lo desengany (The Disappointment).

18th Century: Ramis and John Ramis

Ramis and John Ramis (Mahon 1746-1819) is an exponent of neoclassical theater in Menorca. To situate him, remember that Menorca was under English domain during part of the eighteenth century as part of the vicissitudes of the rest of Catalonia. This allowed the authors of the island to receive European influence directly. Ramis is known for Lucrecia, a work written in Alexandrian verses, influenced by the French and set in ancient Rome, respecting the three classical unities (place, action, and time). When Spanish sovereignty was restored in Menorca, Ramis began to write in Spanish.

Romanticism

During the long nineteenth century, throughout Europe, there were two literary and artistic movements: Romanticism and Realism, the latter leading, in turn, to Naturalism. As for Romanticism, it was a movement that recovered nationalist traditions, representing the soul of the village, both in its more conservative and more liberal slopes. The characteristics of Romanticism are presented below:

1. Rejection of classical canons, thus of the neoclassical aesthetic of the 18th century.
2. Defense of the artist's freedom and originality.
3. Reinvindication of ugliness, horror, and the grotesque, as aesthetics.
4. Incorporation of the mixture of genres, tones, or boldness in the same work.
5. Predominance of sentiment over reason.
6. Exaltation of a certain nationalist patriotic sentiment, related to the recovery of traditions or legends or in the casual medieval atmosphere.
7. Presence of the exotic or adventure in certain works and the transgression of the law or antisocial behavior in its characters.

It must be clarified that these characteristics are rarely all together in the same work. In the Catalan case, they concentrate primarily on the presence or the preponderance of sentiment and nationalism. Important authors: Victor Hugo (French), Walter Scott (GB).

Realism

In terms of Realism, the movement was centered above all on the novel and tried to reflect the themes of their society, as opposed to the evasion of the past implied in Romanticism. Some real dissections of society are found in realist works, such as Comedy humaine, a vast collection of novels by Honoré de Balzac. Also noteworthy are authors such as Stendhal, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarín). Realism was a consequence of Naturalism, a movement created by the French Émile Zola, with two basic objectives:

1. To portray the life of the lower, disadvantaged social classes.
2. To constitute a literary reflection of theories.