Spanish Postwar Literature: Trends and Characteristics

Linguistic Features of Literary Language in Postwar Spanish Novels

The narrator is fully aware of rural life, and orality predominates in the writing. There is precision and clarity in the descriptions, and there are moments of intense lyricism. There is a lack of punctuation and the presence of a kind of refrain. Resources are used for conveying feelings of affection or tenderness. Verbs are used for dialogue introducers. The style sometimes uses verbal nominal ellipsis and hyperbole. There are many examples of literary similes or comparisons. Dialogue includes colloquial language forms: pronouns are used to call attention to the direct style of courtesy formulas. Formulas become formulas of submission, impersonal expression, and euphemisms. The ethical dative expresses the interest of any of the partners in the statement.

Three Subjects in This Narrative

• The Family of Pascual Duarte
• Nothing
• The Shade of the Cypress is Long

Spanish Postwar Novel: 1940s

The atmosphere of cultural disorientation and censorship prohibited much of the narrative production of the most innovative Spanish, European, and American storytellers in the 1930s and 1940s. Isolation prevailed, as well as disorientation. It was a search in a time. It was a critical narrative perspective, but because of censorship, it was not social but existential. There is talk of a parasocial novel.

Spanish Postwar Novel: 1950s

Narrative criticism uprooted, exceeding the realm of the existential and entering the social. Three narrators are the forerunners of this new orientation.

• In 1951, Camilo José Cela offered us, in The Hive, a merciless vision of postwar Madrid through novel structure.
• In 1952, Luis Romero presented the kaleidoscopic structure of The Treadmill, set in postwar Barcelona.

Uprooted narrative began an awakening that led to the birth of the social novel of the 1950s. A new generation of storytellers called the mid-century generation emerged. 1954 was the inaugural year of this new narrative of this new generation. In the social novel, the novelist assumes a social role and denounces the injustice of Spanish society after the Civil War. This new realism, within the heritage of the lost generation of Americans and Italian neorealism, can be divided into two attitudes or approaches:

1. Objectivism: Behaviorist or maxima of the narrator's neutrality. It attempts to capture a piece of reality as objectively as possible.
2. Critical Realism: Attempts to offer a critical perspective of reality and not just sample records, but to complain from the commitment of the narrator.

Technical Limitations and Issues

1. Desicologization
2. These fields are moved by contemporaneity
3. Novels are easily structured and tend to realize their plot in a short space of time