Spanish Literature of the Eighteenth Century: Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment

Spanish Literature of the Eighteenth Century: Neoclassicism

Historical Context

During the last decades of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, Spanish society underwent a profound crisis. Intellectuals in England and France led a change in European thought, challenging the values of the old society and traditional wisdom. In the light of the new century, a confidence in the lucidity of reason emerged. This cultural movement, characteristic of the century, is known as the Enlightenment, and its aesthetic criteria are called Neoclassicism.

In Spain, the process began with the new dynasty, the House of Bourbon, which replaced the House of Austria. The ascension to the throne of Felipe V facilitated the entry into the country of illustrated thought. Through France, Spain took in new rationalist ideas. However, the evolution of Enlightenment thought in Spain was extremely limited, given the opposition of the nobility, the clergy, the uneducated people, and traditionalist sectors.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment movement is the most representative of the eighteenth century. It brought a deep renovation in the production of Europe and a rational criticism of the vision of the world, philosophy, culture, and the religious beliefs accepted until that moment. It was a great modernization across Spain and Europe, not only through the creation of great cultural institutions, such as the encyclopedia, but also through a new conception that imposed reason as the supreme faculty. It fostered a critical spirit and a discussion of all beliefs and convictions (religious, political, scientific), questioning the concept of authority and advancing in general a religious skepticism.

In politics, the consequences of this spirit were the so-called enlightened despotism, in which governments took charge of the people, seeking their greatest happiness in life, along with progress and fraternity. Everything culminated in the French Revolution of 1789.

As a reflection of this spirit, numerous cultural institutions were created in Spain, in imitation of those in France. The main ones were: the Real Academia Española, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Real Academia de la Historia, the Museo del Prado, and the Botanical Garden.

Stages of Eighteenth-Century Literature

Literature of the eighteenth century was not very brilliant, and if the golden age of the seventeenth century was quite low in quality, the eighteenth century was a mediocre period from an aesthetic point of view. Reason predominated over feelings, which were not expressed, standing out in prose and poetry only in advances of a didactic nature.

In the literature of the eighteenth century, Spanish literature can be divided into four stages:

1. The Baroque: the traditional and perpetual Spanish style.
2. Neoclassicism: the first renovation, following the canons of Neoclassicism.
3. Enlightenment: a rational, society-oriented criticism and scholarly investigation.
4. Prerromanticism: the antechamber of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century.

First Stage

From the decline of the Baroque, the period entered a phase of decadence, maintaining only its formal and extensive characteristics. An interesting author faithful to Baroque tastes was Diego de Torres Villarroel of Salamanca, an imitator of picaresque genre paintings in almanacs.

Second Stage

Its works took the first contact with classical French literature (until 1750). Irrational excesses of the Baroque era and its style were criticized.

Neoclassicists sought, through art, to express the harmony of nature in the human mind through reason. They established rules that the artist had to obey. There were perfect models to imitate: the Greco-Latin classics, the Italian and French authors of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.

From this, feeling was proscribed from works. Its works, although well-made, seemed cold. Two distinguished schools arose in this literary era: the Madrid School (of Fernández de Moratín) and the Salamanca School (Jovellanos and Cadalso).

Third Stage

This is the Enlightenment. The step of the Enlightenment was to seek its aspirations in influencing innovative and enlightened programs, discoveries that led to the individual and the greatest public happiness. Literary work sought to combat vice and ignorance through new educational ideals. The dominant genre was the one that best served the Enlightenment's purposes.

Fourth Stage

Arising in the second half of the late eighteenth century, against the rigid neoclassical rules, feelings were placed before reason. Rules were accepted as not fixed. Nature was preferred in its wild state. Prerromantics were, in part, these Neoclassical authors, although considered more mature works. The works of Prerromanticism include the Fuegos and the first appearance of Quintana's new vision of nature, night, and death in constant freedom.

Genres and Principal Literary Authors

· Introduction
The eighteenth century was a fundamentally didactic century. It was given to useful prose, aimed at the service of the diffusion of knowledge and ideas, which was cultivated.

· Poetry
Poetry tried pastorals, anachronistic (exaltation of pleasures) or philosophical, with very scarce sentimental commitment. The poetic language avoided the style of colorful prose.

First Half of the Century

The poetry was a continuation of the Baroque formula. Gerardo stands out, along with Eugenio Gerardo Lobo, with his poems and burlesques, which sought a rhetorical irony within a type of intellectual humor.

Second Half of the Century

Assigned to the second tendency: Neoclassicism. Nicolás Fernández de Moratín is among the anachronistic; Cadalso, and another of the anachronistic direction, with a soft tone and a lively pace. His operas in My Youth and Leisure work on the points that are his own romantic lyricism, although also including morals and satirical compositions and arrangements.

The extremaduran Juan Meléndez Valdés, with a feeling of nature, eroticism, and excitement, or Jovellanos, the great eighteenth-century intellectual and politician, who lived in the positive social instrument of reform. Through his work, he denounced to the nobility the conditions of war.

Late Decade

Progressive increase of prerromantic elements: began imitating the Fuegos of Meléndez Valdés in its dual anachronistic and philosophical aspect, but was gradually giving his style a passionate and enthusiastic tone: the melancholy intimate mound...

· Prose Narrative
The prose narrative genre grew only in the late eighteenth century. There was not really a Spanish novel in the strict sense, if certain hybrid novelistic productions, where form blends with other genres, are not considered. They appeared in memoirs of the century, speeches, diaries, travel books, letters, and essays and journalistic articles.

First Half of the Century

Torres de Villarroel, Diego, with his work Visions and Visits of Don Francisco de Quevedo, whose structure is based on the appearance during a dream of Don Francisco de Quevedo, who guides the narrator through Madrid. In the itinerary, he comments on all the things about the various people found. It is the first caricatural satire.

Francisco Isla, with the famous preacher Fray Gerundio de Campazas, alias Zotes. As a character, Fray Gerundio is a product of the education of the seventeenth century that he received. Isla insists that the dots could naturally be useful if their education had been different. Religious life is portrayed through the lens of a life without religious virtues.

Second Half of the Century

It is conceived with an educational purpose: José Cadalso, with his Moroccan Letters, a famous essay in the form of letters, composed of three characters: two Moroccans, Gazel and Ben-Beley, and one Spaniard, Nuño Núñez. These letters propose a critical analysis and a methodical examination of Spain and the causes of its decadence and backwardness.

Late Decade

The disconcerting prerromanticism develops also in his novel: Noches Lúgubres, structured in the form of a dialogue. It revolves around Tediato (tedium vitae) in an attempt to recover his beloved dead. It is all set in a gloomy room (tombs, crypts of the temple at night), in the style of the curious romance of the period.

· Theater
Two types of theater are distinguished in the eighteenth century:

First Half of the Century

Popular theater, the majority on the taste of the public. The genre predominated in the province of the century, the golden and original texts of the eighteenth century, based on the baroque, relied on spectacularity and extraordinary characters. It was aimed at an uneducated public, for their problems and evasion. There were different subgenres: magic comedy, of saints, of figurehead...

The success of a spectacle depended on aspects external to the theater. Its cards were used in entrée, intercalated entremeses, saints, and tonadillas. This is a genre of minor theater, whose main figure, Ramón de la Cruz, is the creator of more than 400 saints. The saints that were brief parts of Madrid reflected castizo customs of the epoch and were written in one act.

Second Half of the Century

Neoclassical theater. From the 1760s, theater was considered an educational instrument of moral and civic virtues. It took the rules of the three unities, and of the comical and tragic genres. Its first preference was for the bourgeois contemporaries, so it outlawed heroic and imaginative subjects. Neoclassical theater is distinguished by two types:

• a) Comedy (of moral and tearful good customs)
• b) Tragedy

a) Comedy

- Good Customs

It tried to represent national customs. Its themes revolved around rational love, not passionate or sexual relations, and the theme of filial duties of education and the woman's freedom to choose a husband. Leandro Fernández de Moratín stands out with his work: El sí de las niñas.

- Sentimental

Work to denounce comedy and tragedy. It is a type of theater that sought to address social problems and the bourgeoisie in the last third of the eighteenth century. Its most important work is by Jovellanos: El delincuente honrado. The protagonist, Torcuato, is a good and honorable man, confronted with disgrace and the death of his beloved, which cannot be imputed to him. The thesis of the work is against the indiscriminate rise in culpability of the offended, and the offender in a duel. It is concerned with the comings and goings of justice.

b) Tragedy

The principal subjects were the national myths and grand episodes of our past. A special mention is due to La Huerta de Vicente García, author of neoclassical tragedies such as Raquel, which notably features the love of the Jewish Raquel for King Alfonso VIII, and the duty she owes to her monarch, who overpowers her love. The nobles, amotinados, plot to take her life through the hands of Rubén, another conspirator, also Jewish.

· Fable
The confluence of comings and goings of literature, didacticism and criticism, in a genre appearing very characteristic of the century and conducive: the fable, among whose greatest figures are Félix María de Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte, the flutist with his donkey.