Romantic Literature: Key Features of Romantic Poetry, Theater and Prose

Romantic Literature

Romantic literature placed the exaltation of freedom and personal feelings at the center of its concerns. The fundamental aspects of the romantic conception of life were:

• The exaltation of freedom and personal feelings.
• Subjectivism, which became the dominant perspective and the creation of the individual.
• The primacy of feelings over reason.
• A rejection of the vulgar world, with attempts at evasion.

The Romantic Position

The romantic position had its own characteristics, especially in lyric poetry, which experienced spectacular development during the romantic era.

Lyric Poetry: Main Themes

• The poet, his personal experience, his feelings and his state of mind: beliefs, dreams, doubts, fears and personal worries.
• Love as the first and double-edged theme: passionate love that breaks moral norms, and the impossibility of love that can only be reached through death.
• Death, understood as liberation.
• Nature, not as a frame, but as a reflection of the poet's feelings.

Language

• Language is symbolic and capable of evoking sensations.
• Adjectives predominate, and there is a need to reveal the self, often with exaggerated forms.
• Poets shout their intimacy, accompanied by interjections.
• Questions and exclamations abound, expressing wonder before the world.
• Another frequent literary device is inversion (hyperbaton).

Metrical Innovations

Romantics defended free creation and opted for a variety of meters, including the octosyllabic line, the romance, and the disyllabic, trisyllabic, tetrasyllabic, pentasyllabic, hexasyllabic and alexandrine (fourteen syllables) forms.

The Possible Narrative

Narrative poetry was cultivated in several classes. Historical themes were common, often treating medieval or symbolic and philosophical topics, and legends based on folk or literary traditions, mixed with marvelous and fantastic elements, mysterious and supernatural. Fables achieved great success thanks to their social criticism, and many fables contained the first evolution toward humanism.

Theater and Romantic Prose

Theater

Romantic theater triumphed later in Spain than in the rest of Europe. It showed an unbridled sense of freedom and flexibility.

In form: it mixed prose and verse, its works consisted of five or more acts, and it tended toward a diversity of times and places.

In content: tragic drama predominated. Plays dealt with impossible loves, rebellions against politics or morals, challenges, suicide and revenge. There was also a preference for the first and legendary history. In terms of taste, settings were inhospitable landscapes, nocturnal scenes, cemeteries and storms.

Narrative Prose

Narrative prose included two tendencies:

• The novel, which relied fundamentally on imagination and often drew on legends or mysterious past events. In Spain the novel went through two stages: the middle of the novel as entertainment, where novels sought deliberately to move the sensibility toward what was gruesome, causing fear and terror; and the triumph of the romance novel, which looked to the past without imagination, through historical stories, with a predominance of eagerness for local ambience.
• Costumbrist pictures, which responded to popular romantic taste. They portrayed customs and traditional and authentic types. The first major figure was Mariano José de Larra, whose manners articles went beyond costumbrismo into social and political criticism.

Structuralist Literature

Structuralism developed under the cultural history of Spain's realism. Its initiation was in 1870, and the following year it published The Fountain of Gold.

Realism

Realism was a current that spread through literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its fundamental aim was to represent objective reality. To realize this, the author needed rigorous observation of the facts. Realist works centered on contemporary society, and some used their object as direct indignation.

Realist authors aspired to impersonality and objectivity. The abusive presence of the subjective, which characterized romanticism, disappeared from the scene. Their highest aspiration was to turn literature into a science that could not only describe the real world, but even predict facts.

The novel was the triumphant genre, with everyday realism and the objective representation of reality. Language suited each character, and the reality of the time was described in detail. However, since the objectivity of authors was not always fully achieved, realism also offered a vision of the world: the artist discusses his conception of reality and analyzes it, and realist works almost always carry moral or political propositions, often inviting change.

Characteristics of Realism

Realism was characterized by the following aspects:

• Observation: the realist writer tried to reflect reality as it is, selecting the aspects that interested him.
• Description: the fundamental tool of realist writers, used to make reality known, as if painting it.
• The narrator: generally not present in the story, the narration conveys a sense of objectivity.
• Language: simple, sober, with few frills, and frequently reflecting the characters' speech.

Main Genres in Realism

The novel was the genre that best responded to the objectives of realist writers. Narrative genres were the most cultivated in that era.