Catalan Literature in the 19th Century: Romanticism and Renaixença

Political and Social Context

The larger context of political tension occurs during the implementation problems of constitutional monarchies and republics. This creates a climate of uncertainty and insecurity that manifests itself in the cultural and artistic movement of Romanticism. Romanticism presides over much of the nineteenth century, and in the case of Catalan literature, important writers of the end of this century, such as Verdaguer and Guimerà, are heavily influenced by this aesthetic.

The bourgeois social class, with its powerful individualism, was the impetus behind the entrepreneurial middle class in England, which carried out an industrial revolution. The proletariat and workers, increasingly important, also eventually have an important place in the literature of the late nineteenth century.

Renaixença and Romanticism

The Renaixença is a revival movement and definition of Catalan identity. In full illustration of the eighteenth century, it affects only the language and literature, and occasionally politics. While we cannot forget the use of Catalan as the language of the people, as natural everyday speech and expression of the majority of the country, there also exists a large social dimension of popular literature.

Romanticism is a facilitating element of the Renaixença, but they are totally opposed. The arrival of Romantic ideas fosters the development of the Renaixença and the recovery of its own cultural expressions, whether popular or in the dimension of literary creation.

The Writer and the Book Industry

Literature is understood as a business where you make money. The publishing market is a product that makes the writer have to write, subject to market laws, that is, subject to the tastes of the people. Therefore, writers begin to professionalize and live from what they write.

Novels were stories where ordinary people could feel identified; that is, novels were bourgeois. Writers accepted that there are specific rules, which provoked reactions of marginality, bohemianism, etc. These writers felt that devoting themselves to art for art's sake, with no soul, would achieve a change in the rules of society and the world.

Dissemination of the Renaixença

Basic means of dissemination in the nineteenth century were the press, the book industry, plays, satirical-political magazines, and the Jocs Florals. The Jocs Florals came to be very important in the dissemination of Catalan literature. They reached a large size, won popularity, and stimulated the emergence of new writers such as Jacint Verdaguer and Àngel Guimerà. Periodical publications also made the dissemination of Catalan possible.