Spanish Narrative Forms and Key Works

Spanish Narrative Forms

Behave like courtiers and are characterized by the prominence of castidad. Highlight some femeninos characters. The discourse of the pastoral novel coincides with the adventure story in the beginning in medias res and interpolated stories of pastors.

Dialogue in Pastoral Novels

The dialogue can break in two ways:

• Letters: In every story there is an exchange of letters, but not the basic building block.
• Poems: Sometimes it works like knots of the story; they have events to better understand the history, and sometimes they are just resting in the Celestinesca novel.

Other narrative models develop using the servants of love and a procuress.

The Chivalry Novel

This subgenre saw extraordinary development, following the same narrative model as later medieval chivalric works. Its progression was slower, although popularity continued into the early decades of the 17th century. Some sequels were written for novels like Amadis and Palmerins. When love and the heroic knight of medieval stories are included, it becomes the Christian knight fighting infidels in Constantinople, and then the gentleman adventurer. These novels seek to dazzle the readers.

The Moorish Novel

Titles: History of the Abencerraje and the Beautiful Jarifa. The Abencerraje presents the idea of a possible coexistence between Muslims and Christians.

The Picaresque Novel

Lazarillo de Tormes is a major work in Spanish literature, opening a subgenre, the picaresque novel. These narratives are structured as follows: a pseudo-autobiographical story of a character from miserable origins serving several masters. The protagonist has a roguish character; he is smart, wary, and prudent, with a strong desire for social advancement. These novels purport to explain a state of dishonor.

Lázaro's Life and Masters

At the end of the story, Lázaro is forced to abandon his family since childhood and falls into the hands of several masters, developing various trades. Lázaro's life is divided into three groups: childhood, adolescence, and youth.

First Block: Childhood

Masters: blind man, cleric, squire. Here, the blind man taught Lázaro to help in the Mass, which would later facilitate entry into the service of the cleric, his next master, with whom he also suffered hunger, as he did with the squire.